Bluebird Cafe

Um-

But, um, so we wanna talk about Bluebird Cafe.

So the legendary Blueberry, Blueberry [laughs]-

Bluebird

...

Bluebird Cafe, um, is where she really got, um- ... noticed and what got her her record deal.

Uh, I'm stoked because I'm gonna try to go there in February for the first time.

So fun.

Yep.

You have performed at the iconic Bluebird Cafe and other venues like that in Nashville, and so that is awesome.

The Listening Room, and that's actually a cool room where you have to listen to the music.

and uh so yeah i bet you've met a lot of friends that i've interviewed on this program too you probably know like jan buckingham and some other great songwriters there in town

And that's why you do it, man.

It's a labor of love, isn't it? Yes, it really is.

You know, it does give back, and you probably see it at every show you go to, and when you start telling these stories, and especially in those smaller venues like the Listening Room or the Bluebird Cafe, where the audience is right there in front of you, you know, they may even start tearing up over a sad song or a story that you're telling, and you can see that instant impact that music's having on those folks, right? Yeah.

Yeah, and those moments do make it all worth

I think that was right in Eric's vision for the show from the start.

I know we had a few, we had talked about maybe doing it at one point, almost like the Bluebird from the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, where we talked about maybe having all the performers in a circle and the audience around them and doing that kind of sort of in the round situation-ish kind of thing, sort of like I think we tried that meta reading.

It didn't exactly work.

It was a little tricky.

But nonetheless.

One of the first things that was mentioned is the Bluebird Cafe.

I've been there.

Have you been there?

[laughs] It's true.

[laughs]

Did Taylor get in the Washington Post when she went to the Bluebird Cafe? No, she just got found by a random old man, Scott Borchetta.

What did we do? Washington Post found us.

Well, again, two days before.

Some hour at Bluebird Cafe on Thursday, she was with this big bearded guy, the one who runs a pop-up gallery near the canals.

Never seen him before.

They were laughing their heads off.

I spent the next day divvying what was left, meeting the landlord, shuffling lease terms.

Each box moved to the door felt like a page torn out of a book still half-written.

I walked the circuit of our old habit's sidewalk coffee from the stall, spin around the art supply store, even a nameless trip to Bluebird Cafe, where her laughter still seemed to vibrate in the air, even as the crowd was new, the bar wrist indifferent to my familiar face.

That night, after most of the practicalities vanished and the air had shifted from tense to merely hollow, I sorted through the last project we'd worked on to give them a mural study, one of our best.

In 1988, this soon-to-be legend hooked up again with a record executive who earlier had said, nah, you don't stand a chance.

But Lynn Schultz had never seen him live on stage until that one night at the Bluebird Cafe.

And boom! He was inked to a deal with Capitol Records.

Things were clicking, but not as big as the day that he changed the scale of country music.