One recurring theme I've encountered while exploring the music industry since moving to Nashville is just how expendable the giant record labels have become. As it turns out, pissing on your customers is a pretty awful business model. Artists are increasingly finding ways to fund their music that not only don't screw over their fans, but actually bring their fans into the production process, and that allow artists to keep more of what they make from their work to boot.

All of the artists who have done "Songs From My Couch" sessions -- Matthew Perryman Jones and Tom House -- have both had rewarding careers while bypassing the major labels. Jones' last album was funded entirely through a Kickstarter campaign. In a couple weeks I'll post videos from our most recent session with Griffin House, who funded his most recent album the same way.

I bring all of this up because another group of enormously talented Nashville artists are using Kickstarter to fund an album, along with a photo and video series, live performances, art gallery exhibits, and dance. Kate Tucker and the Sons of Sweden are committing to an admirably ambitious project.

We want to record a new album, THE SHAPE THE COLOR THE FEEL, and create a collaborative visual experience surrounding it. We believe that great music is inspired by great films and visual art, and great films and visual art are inspired by great music. It’s a beautiful cycle and we will explore it in this project by working with eight filmmakers to create music videos or short films for each of the songs on the album. We will release each film serially as the album rolls out along with an experimental documentary that retrospectively features the community that this collaborative venture will inevitably foster. And most of all we want to invite you to join us in the creative process.

In a time where a whole world of sound and experience can be compressed into a tiny digital file that we send to each other on our cell phones, we like the idea of attaching moving picture to this tiny little file and giving it some weight. So much goes into creating a song and a sound and an album and even more goes into making a film and all of that time, love, and attention is something we want to remember.

With that in mind, and a great love for collecting vinyl, we also want to give this album a physical presence. We’ll be releasing the album on limited edition 180 gram vinyl featuring art by Australian artist Jessie English. Jessie is creating a photo installation that will exist in the real world and will also inform the overall visual aesthetic of THE SHAPE THE COLOR THE FEEL. Jessie’s work has been shown in Sydney and NYC and we are excited to plan gallery openings surrounding the album release in Nashville, NYC, and Seattle, Washington.

I love this idea. As wonderful as it is that technology, social media, and new music formats are allowing artists to bring fans into the production process, and to write, record, produce, and distribute an album without signing their rights and independence away to Sony or Warner Brothers, the transition hasn't come without some costs. The big, beautiful album art of the 1970s and early 1980s is gone. You now get that 2 x 2 inch square that pops up on your iPhone. The lifespan of the music video as an art form was even shorter. Thriller and November Rain are excesses of the past. The substance of music itself has suffered, too. The MP3 culture has basically brought us back to the era of the single. There just isn't much room for a themed or concept album anymore. Studios also now engineer songs for portable devices, and a lot of sound is getting lost along the way. (There's more to the vinyl revival than just hipster culture. It really is a richer, fuller sound.)

I'm not lamenting the technology, here. The iPod revolution has done wonderful things for music. But in some ways, it has also shrunk music as an art form. There's a bit of irony at work here: As the democratization of technology has made us all increasingly multimedia savvy, music has grown increasingly one-dimensional.

Anyway, back to Kate Tucker. What I love about this project is that its aim is to blow it all back out. The idea here is to bring the visual and conceptual components back to music. You'll be able to download the songs for your MP3 player, but you can also get the fuller, less-loss recordings on vinyl. It's also a pretty bold to create and record a song, then hand it off to a photographer or filmmaker to interpret as they please -- and to let that interpretation be the way the song is presented to the public.

But the real beauty of the project is that just as it seeks to recapture some of what music has lost to technology, it's utilizing the same technology to make that happen. It'll be funded by crowd-sourcing. It will be promoted through social media. You'll be able to see the artwork online, and stream the videos on YouTube. It's really an effort to bring the best of the past and present together.

Of course, it'll never happen unless it gets enough funding. So you should go donate. I did.

Just so you know what you'll be supporting, here's a great song the band released a few years ago:

And here's a more recent acoustic Kate Tucker performance recorded here in Nashville:

When I first moved to Nashville, there were a few local artists I was told to be sure to see as soon as possible. One name I heard from a few different people was Matthew Perryman Jones. He was usually recommended to me with words to the effect of, "It doesn't get much better than just Matthew Perryman Jones and a guitar." They were right.

When trying to think of a way to describe Jones' voice, I keep thinking of the German word gemütlich. It's a state of warmth and comfortableness -- think an amaretto, a fire, and a lazy dog when there's a whiteout outside and ice on the windows. Jones also evokes pensiveness, reflection, and melancholy. His music is sincere, and though not overtly religious, washed with a sort of longing spirituality. He's also hyper-literate -- his latest album was inspired by the letters Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, and by the poet-philosophers Rumi and Federico García Lorca.

Jones was born and raised in Georgia. He started singing publicly around Decatur in 1997, then moved to Nashville in 1999 to start his music career. In 2006 he released Throwing Punches in the Dark, a collaboration with producer Nielson Hubbard. Two years later, the two teamed up again with Swallow the Sea. That album featured the single "Save You," the first of several Jones songs to be featured in a prime time television series. ("Save You" itself popped up in a few.)

Jones' most recent album is Land of the Living, a soaring, grandiose collection of songs that, somewhat contradictorily, he recorded in an Amish barn on the Texas prairie. Jones' growing fan base funded the project with a Kickstarter campaign that raised $25,000.

Jones was kind enough to play some songs from my couch earlier this month. He started with "Just Can't Get it Right," a new song he wrote with Lily Costner. He followed with "O, Theo" off his latest album, then "Echoes of Eden," from Throwing Punches. The final song is a beautifully brooding cover of the overlooked Paul Simon song, "American Tune." Singing backup is Kate Tucker -- another very talented Nashville artist. Sound recording and mixing by M. Allen Parker. Video recording and editing by David Johnson. I provided the couch. The unofficial whiskey of Songs From My Couch is Prichard's Double Chocolate Bourbon.

Jones and I also met for a chat and a few drinks at the Dan McGuiness pub on Nashville's Music Row.

Tell me about the Kickstarter campaign for Land of the Living. How was it different from the way you funded and recorded your earlier albums?

I decided to do the campaign in 2011, when Kickstarter was just starting to become popular. I had heard a lot of criticism of the idea from other artists. But I didn't really find the criticisms valid. When I first moved to Nashville 14 years ago, I was sending snail mail to fans to take pre-orders for my first album. This is just a savvier way of doing that. But you can then add tier offers for fans who want to can give more funding, and get some added perks. I loved the interaction. I offered handmade lyric books, custom paintings, things like that. It puts you more in touch with your fans. I wanted to feel like I was earning their support by putting good work into it.

How do your fans feel about it? I've talked to people who back musicians on Kickstarter who say they love that the money goes directly to the artist. There are no record companies in between to take their cut.

That's the funny thing. While a lot of the artists I've talked to are kind of down on Kickstarter, the fans -- the people giving the money -- seem to love it. They've really been enthusiastic, across the board. Fans I've talked to like to boast about the various musicians they're backing. "Oh, if you like them, you should check out this guy -- I'm backing him on Kickstarter.". I think the fans do appreciate the aspect that they're helping the artist directly in an interactive way.

It's a signaling thing.

People really get into it. And this is the way it should be done. You have no choice but to engage your fan base. And if you do it right, they feel like they're a part of the process. It's great.

How has the music industry in Nashville changed since you moved here?

I came here 14 years ago. I came with the mentality that I was going to be an independent artist. I took a little bit of pride in that -- I wasn't going to go looking for a quick deal with a label. Some of the artists I knew who were starting out at about the same time did get those big deals, but then got locked down. If you don't come up with a single that the label wants to get behind, then you can't put out an album, you can't tour. I know people who just sat in writing rooms for three years. Meanwhile, those of us who didn't look for -- or didn't get -- one of those deals spent all that time recording, touring, and building a fan base.

I'd say that around 2006, maybe 2007, you started to feel a shifting of the landscape. The barriers to recording, publishing, and distributing were coming down. People started to realize that they didn't need the labels anymore. You saw artists become motivated to take more control over their careers.. Formats like Tunecore, Kickstarter and Noisetrade have all been hugely instrumental in allowing me to maintain an independent career and keep getting my music to people. On the touring front you saw a surge in these great collaborative efforts, like Ten Out of Tenn and Hotel Cafe. Artists were taking it on themselves to create new ways to get their music on the road and in front of people in the power of community.

I wanted to ask you about that next. Could you explain what Ten Out of Tenn is, and how it started?

It started when Trent and Kristen Dabbs were driving back to Nashville from a vacation to the beach. They realized that for the entire trip, they had been listening to music recorded by their friends in Nashville. So they came up with this idea of a collaborative artist group. I think Trent came up with the clever title, Ten out of Tenn. It's a catchy title, but then they had to actually get 10 artists to pull it off! But the idea was to bring all of this creative energy together. So everyone has their own career, but the group would tour together, collaborate, and we'd be one another's backing band. Eventually it produced a CD and a documentary.

Nashville has always been known mostly for country music. But there is so much great talent here outside of that. I think Ten out of Tenn took the spirit of the other music here and really held it out for the rest of the country to see. The funny thing is that when we toured, the lazy writers for local magazines still didn't quite understand the concept. We'd be in town and read something like, "Here's the hot new country-western band out of Nashville, Ten out of Tenn."

The great thing is, when you look at the artists who've been a part of TOT, so many have gone on to have great success on their own. It was a great thing to be a part of.

Tell me about your recent collaboration with the Nashville Ballet.

I think someone with the ballet saw a piece on me in Southern Living at about the same time they were looking into collaborating with a contemporary artist. So I was put on the list of people they were considering. Choreographer Gina Patterson ended up really liking some of the songs on Land of the Living and wanted to write her piece to my music.

It was a really amazing experience. I was just blown away by it all. I really knew nothing about dance. But I came away with such respect for the art form -- for the training, for what dancers are able to do with their bodies and how beautifully it physicalizes music. Also, working directly with Gina was so gratifying creatively. I have great respect for her and how much soul she puts into her work. It was a great honor to have been a part of it all.

There's an underlying spirituality in much of your music. Are you a religious person?

I grew up in a religious household. I've gone between bucking and embracing it most of my life. I just have a hard time with the mechanics and dogma of religious practice. However, I can't seem to shake a hunger for something beyond the tangible, call it spirituality or God. And so I think there has always been a spiritual element to my life and naturally that comes out in what I write. I've heard spirituality defined as what we do with our existential restlessness. Sometimes writing songs is what I do with mine. I guess I'm on my own sort of journey with all that. To quote an Emmylou Harris line, "If there's no heaven, what is this hunger for?"

The song "O, Theo" traverses those themes in the life of Vincent van Gogh. Is that why you became interested in van Gogh?

Perhaps. I started reading the Irving Stone collection of his letters to his brother Theo. Van Gogh was such a fascinating figure. Deeply spiritual, but religion was a constant source of conflict for him. You know he was a minister in this coal mining town. He insisted on living in squalor -- he slept on bales of hay. His congregation would give him money, and he would give it away to the people in need. He ended up getting ousted from the ministry because people thought his choice to live in poverty was undignified. It disillusioned him. Ultimately, painting became his religion. To me, he seemed like a true artist. He was truly alive and aware of all that was around him. He soaked it all up, the joy and the pain. Those letters to his brother are so conflicted, so personal. As an artist exploring some of those same conflicts, I just found them really moving.

The first song of yours I heard -- and I think still my favorite -- is "Echoes of Eden." It seems like there are some similar themes there.

Yes, that song is about driving to Atlanta to see my father when he was sick. So I was on the road, thinking about the conversations I'd had with him, the advice he'd given me over the years, and dealing with the reality of death.

I think I actually first heard it on a drive to my own home town in Indiana. It's such a great convergence of lyrics and music. Pensive, reflective words, with that shuffling, hypnotic rhythm. It's cathartic.

That's nice to hear. I was trying to replicate what that drive evoked in me.

Land of the Living seems like some new territory for you. It's such a big sound.

It's funny, it didn't start out that way. But as I was writing, I just found that the songs lent themselves to something a little more grand. I've always loved records with a touch of grandeur -- when an artist just decides to go for it, to bring everything out. And with these songs, it just felt natural.

We recorded the album in Round Top, Texas. In the middle of nowhere. The environment was wide open. It was super windy. We recorded all the band tracks live in about 5 days, working sixteen hours each day. I told the band, "Just go where your instinct takes you." There was no time to over think it. So I think what you hear is a product of the environment we were in, the work demands, maybe some of the desperation that comes with that sort of intensity and time limitation.

I like to ask the artists who do these sessions for their best "Only in Nashville" story. Do you have one?

There's a pretty good story that happened shortly after I moved here. I was just starting to try to make a living as a musician. I hadn't been here very long. I turned to my roommate and said, "You know what? We're broke. Let's go busking." So we set up on Broadway and 2nd and started playing on the sidewalk. I had my guitar case open for tips, playing Dylan tunes. We had played for about 20 minutes and hadn't make a dime. Then when we saw some people with video cameras eagerly approaching.

There was this Swedish documentary team in town. They were making a movie on the American dream. And of course as cocky and cynical young musicians, we were all, "Fuck the American dream, man, it's just a bunch of bullshit." We ended up hitting it off with them, and invited them to stay at our place while they were in town. So they showed up with a 24-case of Budweiser and skateboards. We stayed up until 4 am with them, drunk, telling stories and riding skateboards in the parking lot. They got some good footage, I think.

If you had to recommend a few Nashville artists to people who from out of town, whom would you suggest?

I saw Brooke Waggoner recently. I was just blown away. She's so talented.

It's hard to just recommend a few. There's so much great music here. But I guess I would also recommend Escondido. And Kate Tucker & the Sons of Sweden. I'd also say K.S. Rhoads, whose new album is remarkable.

If you could see any show right now, who would you want to see?

Wow, I'll need to think about that.

I think I'd say Elbow.

I'm not familiar with them.

Really? You should check them out. It's like if Peter Gabriel was singing, and Radiohead was his backing band.

Are there any artists with whom you'd like to collaborate?

My dream would be to collaborate with Emmylou Harris. Or better yet, Emmylou and Daniel Lanois together. Wrecking Ball is one of my favorite albums. When those two work together, they make something incredible.

From what I've read in other interviews, you drew on some pretty esoteric sources of inspiration for the new album. Since we're at a bar, here's my final question: Name four people with whom you'd like to get drunk. Living or dead.

Hmm. I was going to say Bukowski, but . . .

It might be safer to just watch from a distance as he got drunk.

Yeah, I think that's wise.

I've always found Cornell West to be a fascinating person. Not sure if he's a drinker, but I'd still love to sit across the table from him. And van Gogh...though who knows what would come of that. Either way, there would be a story to tell. I think G.K. Chesterton would be interesting, too.

One more.

I'll say Christopher Hitchens. I always enjoyed his debates and appreciated his take on things, whether I agreed with him or not. I could never really pin down his politics. He was unpredictable, but there still seemed to be some core values with him that I admired. I think he and Chesterton could have a good philosophical row while buying each other drinks and becoming the best of friends. And of course we all know Hitch could throw a few back.

"I just don't like killin'," John Hiatt says. "I mean, if somebody's about to harm your family, sure. You do you what you have to do. But to plan out the killing a guy who could just as easily be locked up, I just don't get it. We might as well be lopping off the hands of thieves, cutting out the tongues of liars."

Hiatt is backstage, memorizing lyrics and rehearsing with his daughter Lilly the song they'll sing later in the night. Chris Scruggs, grandson of bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs, was also backstage, chatting with his mother Gail Davies while showing off the ode to Woody Guthrie he taped to his guitar: This Machine Kills No One. (Guthrie's guitar killed fascists.)

Scruggs, Davies, and the Hiatts were all preparing for Monday night's Generations Against the Death Penalty, an annual concert benefit for the advocacy group Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (TADP). As the name implies, the show features Nashville musicians taking the stage with their sons and daughters. The pairings made for some poignant moments--and some terrific music.

The benefit is the brainchild of Lauren Brown, a Nashville-area therapist and part-time musician who became interested in the death penalty while counseling people who had been convicted of violent crimes. "I wanted to be on TADP's board," Brown says. "But then I learned that when you serve on a board of directors of an organization, you're supposed to give them a lot money. I didn't have a lot money to give them!"

Brown says she was talking with fellow Nashville musician James Green and his mother when the idea was born. "I thought since we're here in Nashville, a benefit show would be a great way to raise money. At the time, I was counseling both child victims of crime as well as those convicted of murder. It helped me see that we're all human. So we were in the kitchen talking about the idea of a show with James' mom. She pointed out that there were a couple generations of musicians in the room. So why not make 'generations' the show's theme?"

This is the show's third year. TADP director Stacy Rector says the inaugural event attracted only a few dozen people. But last year it sold out the Station Inn. They moved this year's show moved to the larger and newly renovated 3rd & Lindlsey, and played to a full house. "We're really excited by how much it's grown," Rector says.

Brown played master of ceremonies, and kicked the evening off by asking the audience to sing "Happy Birthday" to exonerated death row inmate Paul House. House spent two decades on death row, was nearly executed, and was released last year after a long legal battle. He's one of two Tennesseans exonerated from death row. The other, Michael McCormick, was also in attendance. House was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis while in prison, which his attorneys say wasn't properly treated by prison officials. The disease now has him confined to a wheelchair. House turned 50 Monday night and celebrated with a seat in the VIP section. "He came last year too, just after he was released from prison," Rector says. "He joked that it was the best concert he'd seen in 23 years."

Green was first on stage, along with his father Doug Green of the novelty country band Riders in the Sky. They were followed by John and Lilly Hiatt, along with Scrugs and Davies. The final set featured Nashville royalty Rodney Crowell and Roseanne Cash, the former husband and wife, along with their daughter Chelsea.

Rector says it hasn't been difficult finding Nashville artists for the cause, even in country music, where politics tend to skew more to the right. But she says that may be because the politics of the death penalty are changing. "Conservatives have never been more receptive to us than they are right now. We've worked with a number of Republican legislators in the last few years. The cost is an issue for them, and I think the innocence case have alarmed some of them."

Highlights from the night include Doug Green's dizzying stretch of yodeling, John Hiatt's solo renditions of his hits "Crossing Muddy Waters," "Lift Up Every Stone," and, in particular, "Feels Like Rain," one of the prettiest songs in Hiatt's massive catalog.

Scruggs and Davies kept the show in tune with the night's theme. Scruggs crooned a mesmerizing take on "Long Black Veil," Danny Dill's haunting ballad of a man wrongly executed for murder. Davies ended her set with "Can We Be Saved?" a soaring hymn about collective conscience and capital punishment she says she had written just a few days earlier. It may have been the song of the night.

Given his history of camaraderie with the convicted, it was fitting that Johnny Cash's daughter would close the show. Roseanne Cash and ex-husband Rondey Crowell took the stage last with their daughter Chelsea Crowell (fittingly placed between them). They ended the night with humor, moving tributes to the Man in Black, and some holiday family bickering.

Chelsea played referee as her parents exchanged barbs between songs, which were likely for show, but rang with the authenticity of a couple who'd fought a few times before. That brought laughs from the crowd, and also set Crowell up for "It's Hard to Kiss the Lips at Night That Chew Your Ass Out All Day Long," his hit with country supergroup The Notorious Cherry Bombs. Cash then sobered the building up with "September When It Comes," the only song she recorded with her father, with her daughter singing his part. The final act encored with two songs. The first was "I Ain't Living Long Like This" the title track from Crowell's first album that Waylon Jennings made famous. Multi-act, star-packed Nashville shows tend to end with a grand medley, and it's a safe bet it'll be something by Hank Williams or Johnny Cash. This one would end with Cash, of course. And so the entire building belted out "Big River."

After the show, Rector points out that the state has only executed six people since 1960. "It's a surprisingly progressive state on the death penalty," she says. While House and McCormick have been freed, neither has yet been declared innocent, which would entitle them to compensation. House could use the compensation to help his medical bills. As House's mother Joyce wheels him out after the show Monday night, she stops to let him say goodbye to Brown and Rector. Not only did the state nearly execute House--and take 20 years of his life--in failing to properly diagnose and treat his MS, the state likely shortened what life House has left. Now the disease also shortens his days. "We'd love to stay and visit," Joyce House says, as others line up to see him off. "But he's exhausted, and he just doesn't function when he gets tired."

There are currently 86 people on death row in Tennessee. The last execution was Cecil Johnson, Jr. in December 2009. Several states, most recently Oregon, have put a moratorium on the death penalty in response to the string of DNA exonerations that began in the early 1990s. That seems unlikely to happen in Tennessee, but Rector holds out hope. "We're reaching out to people of all political stripes," she says. "And we're finding receptive audiences in places you might not expect."

There may be no one alive who has crossed paths with more bold names than Manuel Cuevas, known around Nashville and the music and fashion worlds as simply "Manuel." The Nashville designer, known for his exquisite embroidery and use of rhinestones and sequins, has dressed five American presidents. He made Elvis Presley's gold lamé suit and his famous white jumpsuit, and he's the man who convinced Johnny Cash to dress in black. His clothes have draped Marilyn Monroe, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, and, as he puts it, "three generations of Hank Williamses."

And yet for the dizzying constellation of stars who have stood for a Manuel fitting, he says he has only been genuinely awestruck once. "The Lone Ranger," Manuel says. "When I was growing up in Mexico, I walked an hour each way just to watch The Lone Ranger on television. I wanted to be him. So when I had the opportunity to make his outfit for the show, I was just thrilled to meet him. I didn't know what to say to him."

Dressed in leather python-print pants, a black shirt, and his signature silk neck scarf, Manuel chatted with me last month from his studio on Broadway in midtown Nashville. It's a quaint operation, run out of an old house clearly built to be a residence. The aging floors creak and pop, and the rooms were Manuel and his staff do the fitting, sewing, and embroidery look more like bedrooms, a study, or a kitchen. The ground floor is an inconspicuous retail store, albeit a pricey one. Open your checkbook, and you can pick up a Manuel authentic previously worn by Kid Rock, Faith Hill, or Brad Paisley. (The first time Kid Rock visited the store, he spent $113,000.)

Born in 1938 in Coalcomán de Vázquez Pallares, Mexico, Manuel's brother was teaching him to sew at age 7. By 14 Manuel was making money. He's the fifth of 11 children, but he stresses that his isn't a rags-to-riches tale. "Everyone wants me to tell the sad immigrant story," he says. "But that isn't my story. We were comfortable. My father was a salesman, and he was very smart at it. He could sell condoms to the Pope. I worked hard, I still work hard. But we weren't hungry or wanting of things. I was already successful in Mexico and South America when I moved to America. I moved here because I wanted more. And America is where you come when you want more."

At 22, Manuel moved to Los Angeles, where he worked for several designers and tailors, including Sy Devore, where he designed suits for the Rat Pack. But it was while working for western-themed tailor Viola Grae that Manuel met the flamboyant Nudie Cohn, another talented immigrant tailor (Cohn came to the U.S. from Russia) who would become Manuel's mentor. Cohn went on to start the famous Nudie's Rodeo Tailors, and brought Manuel along, eventually as head designer. Manuel later married Nudie Cohn's daughter, Barbara.

It was at Nudie that Manuel began taking his measuring tape to the entertainment industry's elite, and later to the elite just about everywhere else. Country crooner Porter Wagoner put Nudie on the map with elaborately embroidered suits studded with wagon wheels, tumbleweeds, and other western themes. Country icons like Webb Pierce, Roy Rogers, and Gene Autry soon began to sport Nudie originals, and by the late 60s, Manuel and Nudie were making clothes for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

It was also at Nudie that Manuel cultivated the philosophy that animates his work. "People come to me with a design and say, 'Can you make this?'," he says. "I tell them, 'No. But I can send you to someone who will.' If you want me to make you a suit, let's sit down and talk. Let me get to know you. Who you are. I will then make you the suit you need, the suit that is you, not the suit that you want. If you don't like it, you don't pay for it."

It's a brash way to run a business. And it can probably only be pulled off by a guy who can glance at a list of the seven best-selling artists of all-time, and say he's made clothes for six of them.

It's also how Manuel has conceived some of his more iconic designs. The Grateful Dead came to Nudie in the 1960s. Manuel sat down with Jerry Garcia for an interview. "There was so much joy in him," Manuel says. He and Garcia would develop a lifelong friendship. "But there was this death in the band's name. Death, and gratitude, and joy. It reminded me of Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead festival in Mexico, where we celebrate the dead with flowers and dancing and joy." Manuel designed Garcia a suit embroidered with images from Día de los Muertos celebrations, including flowers, skulls and dancing skeletons. Various incarnations of those images would become the band's insignia.

Manuel's friendship with Mick Jagger may have produced the most recognized rock 'n' roll logo in the world. "We had argued over something, we weren't on good terms. So the next time I saw him I made him a peace offering. It was a pillow of bright red lips, his most recognizable feature. We became friends again." A couple years later, designer John Pasche came up with the "Tongue and Lips" logo for the Sticky Fingers album, a design Manuel insists was influenced by his pillow. Pasche is widely credited with conceiving the design on his own. Manuel says he's fine with that. "We get inspired by the things we see, sometimes without knowing. Of course, it is also possible that two designers could look at him [Jagger] and come up with something featuring his lips."

Manuel's most controversial design at Nudie was likely the suit Gram Parsons wore on the cover of the Flying Burrito Brothers album, The Gilded Palace of Sin. It's also his most haunting. After sitting with Parsons for an interview, Manuel created a suit celebrating Parsons' fast-lane lifestyle. The white suit was embroidered with marijuana leaves, naked ladies, amphetamines, flames up the pant legs, and a towering cross down the back of the jacket.

"Everyone made a big deal about the marijuana," Manuel says. "I told them, this grows all over Mexico. Your son is probably growing it in your backyard. It's not a big deal. I don't think they even noticed the pills we put on the suit. Or the naked women. They were so focused on the marijuana."

In 1973, Parsons would die of a heroin overdose. Perhaps sensing his own fall (also eerily foretold in his gospel-tinged song, "In My Hour of Darkness"), Parsons told the Flying Burrito Brothers' road manager one night that should he die young, he wanted to be cremated. On his blog, Sam Umland, a professor of English and film studies at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, points to a 1997 interview Manuel gave with music critic Michael Jarrett. "I was just making the outfit according to all the ideas that we put together: the nude girls, the pills and the marijuana plants, and the California poppies. The fire up the pants. The cross in the back. Although I captured the idea--we developed it into a great form--it wasn't until a few years after his death that I really started thinking about it. This boy was really telling me how he was going to die."

By the late 1980s, Manuel was ready to leave Los Angeles. "You need to move sometimes," he says. "It's life's greatest freedom, to pick up and move on." It's another theme that echoes in the western motifs in his work. "I was always to drawn cowboys, the frontier, to the open country," he says. "Maybe this is the experience of an immigrant, but I see these new restrictions on allowing people to move around, and it worries me. People should be free to come and go. You can't ask people to live like that."

Manuel's wife suggested Nashville. "She really liked it here when we visited," he says. "You have people here who are in music who would get buried in New York or Los Angeles. They would starve. Not because they aren't talented. It just takes more than talent to succeed there. They come to Nashville and make great music and make a very nice living. It's a different business here."

He says the things that has changed most in his 20 years here is the city's diversity. "When I moved here, I bet there were three of us who spoke Spanish. Now you see lots of Spanish-speaking people, people from all over moving to Nashville. I like the diversity."

Of the five presidents he's dressed, Manuel says Lyndon Johnson was the fussiest. "He had this obsession with wanting to dress like Eisenhower," he says. (A fascinating bit of history in its own right.) Most of his designs for presidents were standard business suits. Only George H.W. Bush got a jacket in the flamboyant style for which Manuel is known. "I made him this beautiful jacket with his entire life sewn into the back. He says he wears it when he's on the yacht."

As we chat, Manuel's cell phone rings. He apologizes, and tells me he needs to take it. It's Larry Weiss, who wrote the song "Rhinestone Cowboy." Weiss is calling about Glenn Campbell, who famously recorded the song, and will be getting a lifetime achievement award at the Country Music Awards. Manuel made the jacket Campbell will be wearing when he receives the award. A good percentage of the crowd at that show will be waring Manuel originals.

As Manuel chats, laughs, and makes a crude joke or two with the one of country music's most successful songwriters, upstairs, his staff stamps embroidery designs into fabric, sews the threads that bring those designs to life, and punch sequins and rhinestones into jackets and slacks. The contrast between the quaint, almost humble operation with the celebrity of its clientele (not to mention its owner) is hard to miss. But this is the way Manuel wants it. He has resisted offers over the years to mass-produce his product. Its limited supply and custom-design is what makes it Manuel.

In any case, the market for his product may be shrinking. "I don't want to sound like a grouchy old man complaining about the new generation," he says. "And trends come and go. But there's no sense of style right now, no showmanship. You pay $100 go to a show, and the artist comes out in an old shirt and jeans filled with holes. Don't be surprised if you leave the show disappointed. Your clothes are who you are. If you can't bring yourself to dress for a performance, you aren't really dedicated to the performance."

If you haven't yet seen the Cold Stares live, here's how it's likely to go down: You'll probably be headed to a Nashville venue like 3rd and Lindsley, or 12th and Porter, or The Basement, and you'll probably be going to see another band. You'll get to the show early enough to see the opening act--this is Nashville after all--and you'll grab a table or a good spot at the bar, and you'll order your drink. I like bourbon.

As you grab your seat, if you're paying attention, you'll probably notice a guy in a short-cropped beard, glasses, and a blazer fidgeting with the sound gear on-stage. That's Chris Tapp, one half of the Cold Stares, and he's putting his guitar rig together. It's a jerry-rigged contraption that incorporates several amps, I was once told involved some MacBook program and--I'm pretty sure--some duct tape and chewing gum. Hang on for just a few minutes, and you'll hear why he's so damned fussy about the thing.

You probably won't be able to pick Tapp and drummer Brian Mullins--the other half of the band--out of the crowd. They don't have band look. No skinny jeans, no hipster facial hair, no iron-ons of cartoon cereal mascots. They dress up for rock 'n' roll as they might for church. Suits, sweaters, and blazers--more Men's Wearhouse than Goodwill. There will be no irony on stage tonight. These guys crush irony like a runt piglet. You're about to hear some rock 'n' roll verisimilitude.

When Tapp and Mullins take the stage, you'll probably be chatting with friends, and like everyone else in the bar you likely won't be paying much attention. Let's say they kick off the set with "John," a burly, bluesy tune about a boatman who loses his woman to a gravedigger--and then kills them both.

Thing is, the very first lick is gonna' turn your head. It's a muscular riff, the sort you might have heard barking out of the analog Alpine speakers in a '78 Trans Am. Tapp will belt out the song's first line, and it'll go like this: Had me a job on a boat, sailed on the deep blue sea. And this is probably the point where you'll decide the conversation you were having can wait. And every time I come home, Tapp will sing on, she was waitin' on the docks for me. And then Mullins will bring in the drums.

By now other heads will have turned, too. And other conversations will have stopped. Damn, you'll think. This is authentic. This is bad-ass blues. By now, Tapp will be repeating the line, John, won't you dig that grave, John, won't you dig that grave, and each time time he'll bend it around a single, lingering strum of a guitar string that feels as if it's about to beckon a hellstorm.

And then he'll drop out the bottom. A deep, monstrous riff will send a warm gust of speaker breath swarming across the room. I've seen it move a napkin.

By now other heads will have turned, too. And other conversations will have stopped. Damn, you'll think. This is authentic. This is bad-ass blues. And now Tapp will be repeating the line, John, won't you dig that grave, John, won't you dig that grave, and each time time he'll bend it around a single, lingering strum of a guitar string that feels as if it's about to beckon a hellstorm.

And then he'll drop out the bottom. He'll conjure a deep, monstrous riff that'll send a warm gust of speaker breath racing across the room. I've seen it move a napkin.

Heads will bob, now. Mullins will have already broken a sweat. The floor will shake; you'll notice ice cubes quivering in your bourbon. At some point, Tapp will bend back at the knees and make a righteous guitar face as his fingers fly around the fretboard like a scurry of squirrels whisking around a poplar tree.

This will go on for an hour. Between songs, people will whisper. They're asking one another if anyone knows who the hell this is. And it's here that you and everyone in the room will have the same realization just about everyone else has the first time they see they hear the Cold Stares live:

These guys are better than the band you came to see.

"The first time I saw them," says Nashville radio personality Dan Buckley, "I thought they had at least two other musicians secretly behind the curtain. There's just no way that sound comes from the two of them."

Thing is, it does. It's big and brawny and ballsy. It grabs you by the shoulders, shakes you until you're converted.

If the Cold Stares' catalog of songs were an actual catalog, it'd be tattered and faded--like your grandmother's hymnal. Probably stained with some blood and whiskey, too. It includes tales of regicide ("Kings," which also includes a nifty little riff Jimmy Page could have written), a valiant attempt to rhyme John Lee Hooker with short-order cook-er ("Cannonball"), and a song that would be at home on an early '90s Lynch Mob CD ("Release You").

The band's typical show-closer ("Red Letter Blues") starts off like some song you've heard Jack White sing, then shifts into something sinister, beginning with a wicked little bridge in which Tapp and Mullins engage in a bit of synchronized noodling. Next comes a thunderous collision of drum and guitar, then the refrain, then a colossal wave of sound that could serve as the soundtrack to a supercell ripping up the Delta countryside.

Tapp and Mullins live in Hendersonville, Kentucky, but as a band, the Cold Stares call Nashville home. They've released two EPs, one self-titled, the other Hot Like Waco, with another on the way. In 2010 they took first in the Nashville region of the Hard Rock Cafe's Ambassadors of Rock competition, and finished second internationally.

Earlier this year, the guys played a four-song acoustic set in my living room. Tapp was nursing a sore throat with some sweet tea--naturally spiked with rye.

Sound engineering for the videos below by Mark Crozier. Camera work by Nashville photographer Dave Johnson. Video editing by both Crozier and Johnson. My thanks to both for their help.

So I guess the first question is for Chris. What's behind the enormous sound that comes out of your guitar?

CHRIS: I just kind of lucked into it. It actually took about six months of playing and working with it before to refine it to where it is now. It can move a lot of air. It's 560 watts live, 4 amp feeds, and very little effects. But it's not just about volume, it's about filling the room. When we first started jamming we were really digging a couple of the songs we were working on, but just thought they sounded horrible without the bottom end. I was dead against sequencing, so I just had to design a rig to do what I needed it to do live. We now have more bottom end live than most 4-5 piece bands. My formula for sound outside the drums with this band is really no different than AC/DC's "Highway to Hell", or The Cult's "Wildflower". Which means you just apply second guitar amps and bass where needed instead of saturating the whole song with it. It makes the song stronger, and more to the point. It makes you really want that bottom end, and then when I give it to you....well....

How did you come to the two-man setup?

CHRIS: We played in another band for a bit that dead ended after a big showcase, and we both just kind of said screw it. After a couple of months, we just wanted to jam. So we got together. We never actually decided we wanted a two-piece band. When this started, we didn't even want to have a band. We were just enjoying jamming without the pressures of trying to be something. "Jesus Brother James" came together one night, and we figured we had some other really good songs. People were wanting to see us play. So we thought we'd just play one gig, just to do a live show again. For that first gig I was actually sitting down in a chair. I still remember the look on people's faces when I kicked the rig in. It was pretty amazing. I had done some acoustic shows with material I poured my guts into, and you know it's the usual thing, people drinking and talking through the set.

So I told Brian after that first gig went over so well: If we were going to continue to do this, I wanted it to be so loud and powerful that no one could talk over it. Even if they're screaming, I don't want to hear them. Sound-wise, I don't think I would have ever tried this in the confines of a full band. I was experimenting with different ways the guitar could be used sonically. I'm running three octaves a lot of times through three amps, and using a unison line. It just has that Black Sabbath-type power, like in "Iron Man." We tried adding a bass player about a year ago, and it just didn't add anything to the songs. Keeping things the way they are gives us a formula and a parameter, and also keeps that ace in the sleeve when it comes to surprising folks at our live shows. A guy that has been following us for about a year told me that's still the best thing about seeing us in new venues: Watching people's reaction when it all kicks in.

I've noticed that, too. It's fun to see. As a two-man rock and blues band, you get the inevitable comparisons to the White Stripes and the Black Keys. Explain why that's wrong.

CHRIS- I don't think anyone that knows our material or has seen us live makes those comparisons. It's kind of like comparing Black Sabbath to Bad Company because they are both four piece bands with guitar players that build from the blues. They're nothing alike. And neither are we. All three bands have drummers that don't really dig the blues, and guitarists that do. I guess Dan Auerbach says the Black Keys don't play the blues. But they just did a Junior Kimbrough record minus Junior, so I don't quite get that. But whatever. Dan's a fantastic singer.

Jack White is a great ambassador for good roots music, and I have great admiration for a guy who pays homage to where it all comes from. Jacks' obviously a brilliant fellow with the marketing as well.

Both of those bands are platinum selling pop acts. We never looked at what we did and thought it would be marketed to the masses. We just wanted to do things that are real for us. Brian doesn't listen to either of those bands. I think we fall more in line with Clutch or The Black Crowes. All three bands now live around Nashville, but we've been here all our lives. I've been playing some of these riffs since I was 13-years-old.

Brian, do you have a philosophy or specific approach to drumming in a blues band?

BRIAN: I just try to play the best part for the songs. I hear different elements from what has influenced me coming out in our music--mostly jazz, rock, and soul records. I like a lot of different kinds of music so I don't really approach it like, "What would a blues player play?" I just try to be true to the song, play honest parts, and make sure that it feels genuine to me. With a new song, I generally like to jump in with something that just grooves, and then let the part evolve over the course of live shows.

Do you remember what made you first take up the drums?

BRIAN: My first drumming inspiration was my childhood neighbor. He had this huge, gold sparkle drum set at his house. I remember thinking it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. I remember hearing his son playing along with songs by the Police. That probably planted the seed. It was years later that I actually started playing, and it's just something I've always stuck with.

You guys are both from Kentucky, but you call Nashville your musical home. Why here? This is a blog about Nashville, so what makes Nashville different?

CHRIS: I've been playing in Nashville since 1997. I had a acoustic band that had a residency at the old Gibson Cafe. We played there for a couple years. We thought we had made it. We were kids driving into the big city, you know. We were playing folks blues stuff then, but not too far off in terms of songwriting from where we are now. So we've been around. It's a different scene now in Nashville. Back then, only a lucky few bands could get a deal. Dreams. The land before Napster. I was trying to get a deal with Sire, but we really had no clue what we were doing. Americana was just catching on. The only rock success stories I knew of were Matthew Ryan and Josh Rouse. Mindy Smith played slots before and after us at the Gibson, and there were other people I knew that had things in the works, but nothing like it is now.

L.A. just kind of folded and Nashville is the place where everything landed. But even the deals now aren't that great. I still wouldn't say Nashville has a great rock scene. It's kind of like if all the NBA stars moved to one city, but the city's team could still only have 12 players. Danny Ainge isn't going to have anything great to say about Kurt Rambis if Danny Ainge doesn't make the team. Everyone in town plays music, so a lot of folks in town aren't going to polish your shoes if they think they can do the same song and dance better. Nashville has ten times as many music venues with live music seven days a week than any other town on earth. You can't escape it. For artists, I guess that's both the greatest thing and the worst thing. Nashville is like an abusive relationship.

I've heard that before. That Nashville has such a great music scene, but musicians don't necessarily love playing here, because most of your audience will be made up of other musicians.

But even with all of that, for me it's still the greatest city on earth to be a musician. Probably the smartest thing for us is living an hour or so away, and being able to come and go. In our hometown [Hendersonville, Kentucky], we have a huge blues festival and a bluegrass festival, and there's always been a strong connection to both of those traditions around here.

BRIAN: There are so many things I like about Nashville. There's so much talent here. We have our places we like to eat or hang out. It's a very competitive endeavor to draw an attentive audience in any city, but even more so in Nashville because of the number of great bands. So while I feel like we've been successful in the cities we've played in, I'm especially proud of our progress in Nashville. We know how tough it can be here for bands starting from scratch.

Your songs include quite a bit of religious and historical imagery . . . and also a lot of killing. Do you come up with a few riffs first, then write lyrics, or the other way around?

CHRIS: 50/50. We either just riff something in practice, come up with a section and then I write lyrics to it from there based on the mood it brings, or the whole song just hits me at once and I write it down start to finish. "John" and "Jesus Brother James" were finished in my head before I picked up the guitar. Scribbled them on a piece of paper early in the morning. A song like "Cannonball" is one that we just jammed out. It's nice not sticking to the same method all of the time, I think.

As far as imagery, I think that's what I take from the early Delta artists that I love more than anything. Son House sang about women, drinking, gambling, and Jesus. Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James, Bukka White--they all sang about what was real to them. I identify with that. I grew up in church, I didn't know my real parents until I turned 30. I was born in Eastern Kentucky, and Brian and I grew up in the River Valley. That area has a lot of history. I identify with Johnny Cash and Robert Johnson. I've been arrested, and I've been saved. If I grew up in Jersey as an atheist, I guess I'd write about factories and science.

At your live shows you cover the Allman Brothers, Fleetwood Mac, Jimi Hendrix. Did you listen to a lot of AOR growing up?

CHRIS: I had a God-brother that lived behind me when I was a kid who was 12 years older than me. When I was about seven I saw a Jimi Hendrix poster on his wall. I remember him showing me the inside cover of Ted Nugent's "Cat Scratch Fever" and thinking, "What the hell is this?"

I also remember being on a church retreat around that time and some kids had smuggled a Black Sabbath record into the basement of the lodge, cranked it on this giant wood box record player thing, and I can't begin to tell you what kind of effect that the first 30 seconds of "Paranoid" had on me. There's great stuff in any decade of music, but the seventies guitar rock stuff is a huge influence.

BRIAN: I listened to a lot of everything. Album-oriented rock was the most accessible when I first started getting into music. Obviously as a kid, you sometimes like what's trendy, or what your friends expose you to. I would read about these bands, then check out what influenced them. So going backwards, I first listened to Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Hendrix, and then moved to jazz and blues from that.

You get to assemble a band for one show. Anyone, living or dead. Who's on stage?

CHRIS: Jim Morrison on vocals, myself and Peter Green on guitar, John Paul Jones on bass, Keith Moon on drums. No way I'm putting that lineup together and not playing with them.

BRIAN: Cedric Bixler-Zavala on vocals, Ray Manzarek on keys, Jeff Beck on guitar, Tony Williams on drums, John Entwistle on bass.

Who would you want to jam with?

CHRIS: I'd love to work with the Chino from the Deftones, Jimmy Page, Josh Homme. I'd love to do ZZ Top's comeback record. Shave the beards and get lowdown in the street.

BRIAN: Ian Thornley, Clutch, Tom Petty, MGMT, Pink Floyd, The Who.

Let's talk about the music industry a bit. What's it like to be an unsigned band in a city full of musicians? Do you get frustrated?

CHRIS: I'm probably always frustrated, never satisfied. When a band plays a gig, the venue does $5,000 at the bar. The band makes $400.00 at the door, pays $150.00 production, $100.00 in gas and travel. You split the money up, and most times you're breaking even. A lot of bands play for free in Nashville because they just want the gigs. But just because a hooker will lay you for free doesn't mean you should lay her. Get paid for what you get--it helps the whole community.

There's no money in downloads, no money in touring, so what is there to not be frustrated about? But Dan Baird once said to me, "we are lifers." This is what we do. It's not like you can say, "At 30, I'll quit playing music and just teach history." Bullshit. I didn't wake up one day and say I'll be a musician. It's just who we are. We are doing it whether there's success to be had or not. It's just a shame that even in 2011, everyone else involved still has a bigger cut of the pie than the folks who are doing the baking. We don't want to get rich, we just want to be able to continue doing what we do. Why should someone that wants to have a relationship with us also be forced to have a relationship with Sony, or whoever?

We're working towards something that we are launching in early 2012 that we think will be unique to the industry. It might finally cut out the middle man, and create a better relationship between fans and artists. So stay tuned.

BRIAN: I'm very grateful for every chance I get to play. I'm also greedy in the fact that I want it to sound great, I want people to pay attention, and I don't want to have to pay $17 to do it. It's tough playing rock and roll. I concur with what Chris said, and would add that any frustration I have is just because this thing is special, and I want as many people as possible to be able to experience it.

The music business model is changing. You've had some success selling your own CDs. Is signing with a label still even necessary?

CHRIS: Everything we've done can be attributed to people who dug what we are doing, who then turned more folks on to it.We're in the process of creating something that will enable and encourage that kind of community, and make everyone feel like they are a part of the band's success. We have talked to some labels, and at this point I don't think we're interested in signing with one. I'm not saying we wouldn't sign in the right situation. But at the moment, I think some of these record labels are in the same boat as these Wall Street cronies. We're hoping that by February 1st, 2012, you can visit www.thecoldstares.com to see the new direction we're going, and if you dig what we do, you can join us in making some changes to how it all works.

BRIAN: I'm interested in continuing to make records. I'd like for people to hear those records. And maybe to have a budget to record without having to watch the clock. But I don't know if a label is the best way to accomplish that. When you're a kid, you think that the label comes to you and says, "Hey, would you like a golden egg? We love your songs." It's just not like that these days. It's an 85/15 split between label to artist. And that is just unacceptable.

Chris, you have a great family story involving your great grandfather that's really a blues tune waiting to be written. Want to share it?

CHRIS: I think I'll hold on to the details until the song is written. But the gist is that my great grandfather killed the sheriff and his deputy brother in the late 1920's after the cops did some ill things to my grandmother and her sisters. I was told about it in high school by their great grandson. It was a tough story to hear from my grandmother. It was a different time in America, definitely a different system of law. I've kind of held off from writing that because it's still a painful thing for my great aunt. She's still kicking it at 103.

You guys don't really project the image of the typical Nashville musician. You generally drive up from Kentucky for your shows, drive back after. You're dapper, not ironic. Is that all a conscious thing--to stay clear of the noise?

CHRIS: What does a musician look like? Sure we do. We look like the bands we like. Afghan Whigs, Muddy Waters, Clutch. We don't look like the Kings of Leon, but they didn't look like Kings of Leon on their first record, they looked like the Black Crowes. I might wear a suit because that's me. I like to wear suits. I like southern things, old things, it's who I am. If I'm holding a gun it's because I am about to shoot it, not because I want to be seen with it. These bands in their sarcastic t-shirts and their dirty skinny jeans are no different than Bon Jovi and Poison twenty years ago. That's not them. Then you couldn't get noticed from the labels unless you looked like a woman. Someone likes that stuff, and that's great. It helps draw a line between us and them. We are more concerned with being a good band live, and writing great songs than coming up with the right color theme for our band.

I don't think we are intentionally trying to stay clear of anything. We are working with the best folks in town right now. We're very close with some great bands in town and have a great relationship with the venues we play. We wouldn't be where we were if Ron Brice at 3rd and Lindsley hadn't given us a shot. We have a great relationship with Lightning100. We aren't going to go out of our way to be associated with someone that worked on so and so's record in the 90's just because they worked on so and so's record in the 90's- and there are a lot of those kinds of people in town like that. Who want to be seen with the latest thing for their image.

We just aren't like that. We're small town, and we choose our friends and relationships with people based on who they are as much as what they've done. Instead of the music social events, we're usually in the studio, or at someone's pad playing music. It's the stuff outside the stage and studio that turns us off. My friend Ryan Smith, who has a dozen or so #1 MTV videos in L.A. in the last decade, came up and crawled through the woods to an abandoned, 1940s Pentecostal church in rural KY to shoot some photos of us. [Note: See some of those photos in the video for "John" above.] Our friends get what we are. It's not about L.A., or reality shows, it's about honesty. We have the most unpretentious team of folks I could ask for.

What's coming up for you?

CHRIS: Probably spreading out a bit for 2012 and picking up some tours across country. Multiple new records and the new website in January that will launch our new music model with our community of fans. Possibly some film and TV placements. We'll just keep ours head down and continue to work. We are very thankful, and grateful, and want to do the best we can so that the people that have worked so hard to help us will see it wasn't in vain.

Check out the Cold Stares on Facebook.

Nashville is probably still primarily known for producing big, highly-polished country music. But just barely. The city has flourished with new sounds and creative power over the last decade that long-time residents of the city's music scene I've talked to say they haven't seen since the Johnny Cash/Kris Kristofferson crowd turned the city upside down in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rolling Stone recently named Nashville's rock scene the country's best. Music heavyweight Jack White, who may be the best producer in the country not named Joe Henry, put his studio here. The Black Keys moved here. So did Keb' Mo' (pictured).

The new Nashville sounds really aren't new. They go back decades, in some cases a century or more. But the classification of them is. Nashville has become a hub of Americana music, the amorphous category the New York Times recently called "the coolest music scene today." At this past weekend's Americana Music Festival, more than 100 acts from across the country converged on Nashville to demonstrate the sound's broad range of styles and influences.

Fans, producers, practitioners, and followers of Americana seem to be preoccupied with defining it, and with that, setting up fences (white and picket, naturally) to separate what gets included, and what doesn't. One of the panels at this year's conference was titled, "Is Blues Americana?" I didn't attend, but I can only hope the answer was, "You're damn right it is." In his introduction to the festival's program, the president of the Americana Music Association -- the improbably-named Jed Hilly -- notes that the word Americana was recently added to Miriam-Webster's dictionary, with the definition: "a genre of American music having roots in early folk and country music." That seems not just narrow, but backward. Americana doesn't have "roots," it is roots. It isn't really a genre, either. If you had an "Americana" section in your record store (assume for a moment that there are still record stores), you'd need to pull enough music from other sections to make a mess of the place.

America is a nation of mongrels. American culture is a fluid, organic mix and hybridization of other cultures. It seems appropriate, then, that the most well-known champion of Americana music at the moment is Robert Plant, a British rock 'n' roll god who rose to fame by mimicking (sometimes rather blatantly) American blues artists. And the most popular Americana act in the world right now might be Mumford and Sons, also British. Whiskeytown's Strangers Almanac, the band and album that popularized the alt-country sound that you could argue launched the Americana movement, featured vocals by Alejandro Escovedo, a son of Mexican immigrants. In 1998, the flagship Americana publication No Depression named Escovedo artist of the decade. Thirty years ago, a band like Los Lobos may not have been considered Americana. Today, there's no question they are.

So here's a better definition: Americana describes any type of music primarily influenced by uniquely American varieties of roots music, notably country, blues, gospel, bluegrass, and jazz. So all bluegrass is Americana, but not all folk. Some rock is Americana, but not all of it.

Enough esoterica. Let's get to this weekend's festival. The nice thing about the Americana Music Festival is that it's hosted in Nashville's great venues. The bad thing about that is that it makes it more difficult to wander from stage to stage. For the most part, you pick your venue for the night, and you stick with it. The venues don't always stick to schedule, so if you try to venue hop between acts, you're going to miss quite a bit. I spent most of my time at Mercy Lounge and Cannery Ballroom, both because they had the artists I most wanted to see, but also because it was the only venue with two stages. But that meant missing acts like Hayes Carll, Marshall Chapman, Will Kimbrough, and old-timy revivalist Pokey LaFarge.

The most awing act I saw this week was the Blind Boys of Alabama, on Wednesday night. Religious or not, the Blind Boys live version of "Amazing Grace" is something everyone ought to hear before they die. I'm an agnostic, and I was ready to believe. They also belted out Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready," one-hit wonder Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky," and Tom Waits' "Down in the Hole," a treat for fans of The Wire. Musicians sometimes say they don't like playing in Nashville because it's more a city of musicians than a city of music fans. There's lots of standing, sometimes nodding, lots of judging, but little dancing. For the hour the Blind Boys took the stage, the crowd moved. The Blind Boys just create joy.

The Muscle Shoals tribute, also on Wednesday, was also lively. The two hour revue was hosted by Nashville's Webb Wilder, and featured what might be the best sessions band ever assembled, including Muscle Shoals guitarist Jimmy Johnson, keyboard great Clayton Ivey, and some of Nashville and Alabama's best studio musicians. A mix of soul legends and contemporary acts then rattled off Muscle Shoals hits like "Mustang Sally," "I'm Your Puppet," and "Old Time Rock 'n' Roll." It was particularly thrilling to 1970s soul goddess Candi Staton.

The best part of the music festivals is the chance to discover artists you hadn't heard before. I'm a new fan of Carrie Rodriguez (pictured), a winsome, fiddle-playing, bilingual flash of talent from Austin. Rodriquez can be both sassy and sentimental, but she bleeds authenticity, perhaps because she's a protegee of longtime songwriter Chip Taylor.

Other notable performances I saw: The Jayhawks, reunited with a new album, did a crowd-pleasing 90-minute set on Thursday, drawing heavily from their 1995 breakout album Tomorrow the Green Grass. Keb' Mo' played Friday night, with his son on drums behind him. John Oates, minus Hall, put on a surprisingly soulful and boogie-able show. Nashville regulars Buddy Miller and Jim Lauderdale took the stage together, and announced between songs that they're also recording an album together. And in a city that was flush with virtuoso guitarists this weekend, the best of all of them may well have been Luther Dickinson, who played with his band the North Mississippi All-Stars on Friday night.

The festival's showcase was the awards show on Thursday night at the Ryman Auditorium, Nashville's prized venue that quite literally elevates music to a religious experience -- the building was originally a house of worship. The show was hosted by Lauderdale, a showman known as much for his charisma and year-round tan as for his guitar work. It featured performances by Plant (who also won Americana Album of the Year), Alison Krauss, Hayes Carll, the Avett Brothers, and Buddy Miller, who also won Artist of the Year.

There are a number of reasons why Nashville has emerged as the hub of the Americana sound. Part of it may just be geography. The city sits nearly in the middle of the basin of American roots music, extending west to Austin, north to Chicago and Detroit, east to Appalachia, and south to New Orleans. And of course, Memphis, Muscle Shoals, and Kentucky bluegrass are a tank of gas away.

But there's more to it than that. Nashville's also the home of big FM country, the over-produced, commercially-successful variety of country polished of all its grit. Americana is in a lot of ways a reaction to that. It's a return to roots. Hayes Carll, the wry, literate Austin musician who was also up for Americana artist of the year, sings of mescaline benders, weekends drenched in booze, and politics. He broke out with a song called "She Left Me for Jesus," a catchy, subversive song that both convincingly mimics Big Country and is delivered with a knowing smirk that Big Country will run like hell from it.

Nashville is also where the late Gram Parsons made his home. Parsons was the first to fuse country and rock -- or at least who first did it best -- and is often credited as the founding father of alt-country and Americana. Parsons himself dubbed his style, "cosmic American music." Back in the early 1970s, a Long Island DJ asked Parsons and his songwriting partner (and longtime Nashville resident) Emmylou Harris if they'd call their music "progressive country." Harris bristled, and quipped that she and Parsons actually played "regressive country." That is, they were pulling country apart, adding back the grit.

Americana may have taken root in Nashville not because Nashville's leaving country, but because it's more country than what those bigger buildings on Music Row now call country.

A few more photos from the festival:

Martin Scorsese's epic three-and-a-half-hour documentary, "George Harrison: Living in the Material World," is a tender exploration of what sets George Harrison apart, both in his work and life.

Widow Olivia Harrison is a co-producer on the film, so perhaps it's no surprise that Harrison's legacy remains untarnished; there are no new damning revelations. Unlike the 10-hour-plus "Anthology" documentary from 1995, this is not an exhaustive perspective on the rise and fall of The Beatles. Instead, it's a chance to get to know George Harrison as his close friends once did.

The documentary features new interviews with key figures from Harrison's life, including his widow, his son, Ringo and Paul, and Eric Clapton. Recollections of intimate, sometimes seemingly minor, encounters with Harrison make up much of the movie. While the film is not heavy-handed in its artistry, it's clear that the interviewers spent considerable effort getting these people to come up with memories that only his loved ones could have had.

Olivia Harrison's retelling of George Harrison's stabbing is detailed and harrowing. An old friend talks about what Harrison said in a call after Lennon's murder, prefacing it with, "I don't even know if I should be telling you this." Dhani Harrison, George's son, recalls running out into the garden and frolicking with his dad. He also recounts the time he realized his dad was cool, when Harrison told some cops to "fuck off" after Dhani got in some trouble. This is not a George Harrison you are likely to get from broader Beatles lore.

Not that there aren't precious discoveries for Beatles fans. Photos of the early group, gussied up, standing in the stodgy English drawing rooms of their families, are incredible, as is footage from very early concerts in crowded, tiny venues. Harrison's older brothers describe an incident where John Lennon pours a pint on an old lady's head at a family dinner, with the proclamation, "I now anoint thee David."

While Scorsese touches on the more troubled parts of Harrison's life (his problems with drugs, his declining critical success, the breakup of his first marriage), he doesn't linger there. The film is unabashedly a celebration, and can be viewed as a fresh framework with which to approach Harrison's music.

Harrison himself is allowed ample time to show off the acerbic wit and generous spirit that endeared him to so many. The documentary goes through general Beatles history -- for instance, their stay in the training grounds of Hamburg and their switch from Teddy Boy bouffants and suits into leather jackets and heeled boots. But it's primarily the story of Harrison's artistry coming of age. The breakup of The Beatles, as seen here, was pretty much inevitable from the time George decided that he, too, wanted to be a songwriter.

While Lennon and McCartney -- shown as older, better-developed talents who were able to use each other to fuel their writing -- dominated the band's output, Harrison quietly devoted himself to getting better. During that time, he compiled a backlist of songs rejected for The Beatles that eventually helped fill his first, three-disc solo record.

The story of Harrison's post-Beatles life shows us a man who kept searching for an artistic family. Harrison formed the super group Traveling Wilburys with Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan and Roy Orbison, because, as Petty says, "He liked to surround himself with people who were good at something." He also saved the Monty Python production "Life of Brian" when it lost funding due to its provocative content, mortgaging his house in the process and helping form a production company, Hand Made.

The title of the documentary, and to a large extent its subject, is "Living in the Material World." Harrison's spiritual conversion to transcendental meditation is presented as a dominating force in his life.

Harrison's response to Eric Clapton's famous statement, "I'm in love with your wife" -- to which Harrison reportedly said, "Go on take her," and, "Can I have yours?" -- is recast as having emerged out of this anti-material mindset. Harrison was obsessed with the idea that the way you leave your body at death is crucial, and was angered by Lennon's murder for the way it robbed him of his chance. He prepared for his own death most of his life.

The result was apparently somewhat supernatural. His widow, Olivia, telling the story to the filmmakers, says, "You wouldn't have needed to light the room if you were filming it -- he lit the room."

The first installment of "George Harrison: Living in the Material World" premieres Wednesday night, Oct. 5 on HBO at 9 p.m. ET, with the second installment to follow on Oct. 6.

Watch the trailer below: