Over the past few years, Nashville has almost completely changed. What once was a sleepy southern city has been overtaken by WeWork buildings and bachelorette functions. While all these changes are all fine and dandy, natives to the south can’t help but scratch their heads and wonder where all the history went. You don’t need to dig up a forgetting section of the city to relive its youth, singer/songwriter duo Eric Brace and Thomm Jutz have found the sonic equivalent of a Nashville hidden gem. “Nashville In The Morning” is an ode to the city’s history that is drenched in twangy guitar that is expertly plucked and vocal harmonies that act as a beacon of light to the memories the locals always look to.
Despite their long-standing working relationship, Brace and Jutz first connected over 20 years ago via their mutual friend Peter Cooper. The duo has done it all together, from playing hundreds of shows over the years to being a part of five different albums for the Red Beet Records label. Sadly, their connective tissue and a valued member of the music scene, Peter Cooper passed in December of 2022. With two of the trio left, Brace and Juts did what they do best, create music. The results are the 14 songs featured on the duo’s new album Simple Motion, set to be released via Red Beet Records on February 16.
“Nashville In the Morning” is our latest heartfelt single from the passionate LP. If you’ve spent any time at all in Nashville over the past few years, you’ve seen the changes,” explains Brace “They’ve come faster and been more brutal than we could have imagined. The passage of time can be devastating, but time is like geology, layered with the past, a past that’s still there if you know how to look.”
And if anyone knows how to look, it is this duo. The vivid imagery that pushes this single forward gives us a glimpse of what it is like to experience nostalgia, even if the memories are not our own.
“I was driving to downtown Nashville one morning and stopped at a coffee shop on 8th Avenue. Right next door, Douglas Corner Café, one of the great old live music venues, had just closed shop. I thought about all the magnificent concerts I had seen, the gigs I had played and the friends I’d made there.” explains Jutz on his relationship to Nashville and its ever-growing music scene. “I thought about the hundreds of photos on its hallowed old walls. Collages of a Nashville we won’t see anymore. Many of the faces gone now. John Prine, Joe Sun, my old boss Nanci Griffith, Townes van Zandt, Guy Clark, David Olney, who had given me some of my first gigs in Nashville, and of course, my brother and mentor Richard Dobson.”
“Reminiscing is never easy but “Nashville in the Morning” turns the ritual into a cathartic one>” adds Jutz. “But so it goes, time marches on. I drove off to where I was going and saw a girl with a guitar walk down an alley on Music Row. It all made sense, the image of her, the images of the folks in the photos at Douglas Corner, and the omnipresent high rises and cranes in downtown Nashville. It was a quiet morning. I wasn’t sad, I felt a part of it all, as I do now.”
“Nashville in The Morning” finds two of the city’s storied musicians looking back on its history and putting its stories to gentle strumming and lush textures. The twangy single showcases two veterans with years of chemistry in their corner pen a moving poem to the city that made them the musicians they are today. Check out the premiere of “Nashville in The Morning” below and look out for Simple Motion on February 16.
