This Is Nashville

Kevin Dyson was part of the biggest play during the biggest season the Tennessee Titans have had to date. He saw the highs of the Music City Miracle and the bitter lows of being one yard short at Super Bowl XXXIV. And before long, he found his injury-prone career cut short in 2005. He wanted to coach but didn’t have the credentials. So he went back to school and found education was his passion. He...

It’s now or never to plant something if it’s going to survive the Middle Tennessee summer. Today, we dedicate our weekly roundabout to the when's, where's and what's to plant — or whether we should plant at all given the dry spring we’ve had. Our panel includes an arborist, a naturalist and a nurseryman and we want to hear from you! The phone lines open at noon at 615-760-2000 . You can also pop i...

Tasked with overseeing Title VI compliance , the Metro Human Relations Commission works to ensure that the city’s 10,000 employees can do their jobs free from discrimination based on race, color, or national origin. Since 2015, the commission has released IncluCivics , a recurring report that looks at the hiring trends, retention rates, and progress toward building a more inclusive environment acr...

America’s rural hospitals are closing at an alarming pace, and Tennessee holds the highest closure rate. In a series of reports this month, WPLN takes an in-depth look at this crisis — how it has harmed communities and what is being done to reverse course. In this episode, Health Reporter Catherine Sweeney and This Is Nashville host Blake Farmer dive into history of these closures. Then, Catherine...

Today we meet Wu Fei , a master of the 21-string Chinese zither known as the guzheng. A classically trained composer and singer, Wu Fei was educated in China’s conservatory system before continuing her studies at Mills College in the United States. She eventually made her home in Nashville, where her sound has evolved through collaborations with local folk artists . Though her roots are deeply cla...

It’s time for our weekly Roundabout – a chance to step back and make sense of the biggest local headlines shaping Middle Tennessee. This week, we unpack the controversy over an Apache helicopter flyby at Kid Rock’s property that drew attention all the way to the White House, the firing of a library director who refused to remove LGBTQ-themed children’s books, and the role of dark money in ad campa...

You could start listing the locally owned restaurants that have closed already this year and tell a pretty dire story: Margot, Varallos, Pelican & Pig. And we’re just three months into the year.  But restaurants that are part of out-of-town investment groups have closed too — all while new concepts are opening up. Is it simply natural churn in a volatile business? We know it’s more expensive t...

The White House is experimenting with state-level immigration laws in Tennessee, but most of those proposals have hit resistance, and it's now do-or-die time for any bills. An expansion of private school vouchers is also far from a done deal with some Republicans objecting to doubling the program without performance data available. And the state’s $58 billion budget has lobbyists in a frenzy to ma...

Knuckleball pitchers are a small fraternity, and R.A. Dickey is one of its most notable members. R.A. Dickey learned the unpredictable knuckleball pitch as a last-ditch effort to save his major league baseball career. Once he mastered its spin-free magic, it transformed his game. But for Nashville’s own knuckleball king, that journey paralleled something deeper: an epiphany that reshaped his perso...

WNXP is the music discovery go-to in Nashville. On 91.1, listeners get exposed to all kinds of songs not in their regular feed. But it doesn't stop there. They do more than tune in. Listeners play an active role in how playlists are curated, making the station an interactive, communal space for sonic lovers. In this episode, folks who have been with the station since the beginning share their stra...

Each month, Mayor Freddie O’Connell joins us live in the studio to take your questions –– and nothing is off the table. We're asking about the latest on budgets and property taxes, updates on fairground racing, and a proposal to expand childcare access in Nashville. But as always, the most important questions are yours. So what’s been bothering you lately? Are you still dealing with lingering issu...

Much of Middle Tennessee’s important Native American history has been disturbed by development. This has prompted listeners like Kelly Cannon to wonder what’s been lost. She asked Curious Nashville about something she’d heard about the Brentwood Library: "A colleague recently told me that when the Brentwood Library was built remains were found of ancient Mississippian people, along with evidence o...

Holly Kernan still needs Google Maps to get around Nashville and she's fine with that. Nashville Public Radio's new CEO came from Oakland, where she spent most of her career in public radio and where, as a fourth-generation Californian, she's a genuine rarity. Those deep roots didn't stop her from spending her entire young adulthood in Spain, though, lost and entirely at home making historical doc...

We’ve learned a lot this week exploring the nuts and bolts of songwriting — from the creative process to the realities of the business. But we also have more questions. Today, three Nashville songwriters in various stages of their careers join us to tell us their stories and answer any lingering curiosities. Plus, they take your calls. Country Music Hall of Fame songwriter Rivers Rutherford, along...

The business of songwriting is a full-blown economy of its own — chock full of jargon like “splits,” “P-R-Os,” “plugger” and “mailbox money.” But what does it all mean? Today we follow the money: how writers get paid, what happens when a song gets cut, what the different kinds of publishing deals are, and what the implications are for copyrights now that AI has come to town. It’s day three of song...

Country music songwriter Harlan Howard famously described country music as “three chords and the truth.” He makes it sound simple, but thousands know it’s much more complicated – and it’s different for everyone. It may start with an idea and then come together from there. Or a note or a phrase may come first and then it’s built word by word and note by note. On day two of songwriter week, Grammy-n...

She's a subversive storyteller, slipping in sideways with hard-to-swallow truths.  Growing up in Motown, Alice Randall was drawn to the sounds coming from Music City. The dream was to invade the “citadel” of country music, elevate progressive ideas and highlight the Black roots of a very white genre. She would become the first Black woman to co-write a number one country hit — Trisha Yearwood’s “X...

We started the year with a strong roster of profile episodes, each featuring an outstanding guest with a story that’s made a local impact. But six of them stood out to us, and we want to give listeners a recap. In today's episode we feature an Olympic Gold Medalist , a public school teacher who performs drag , one of the few Black artists to ever crack the Billboard country charts and more. So you...

Unemployment rates are still quite low. But they don’t tell the whole story. The face of joblessness has changed in recent years. Mid-career professionals, six-figure family breadwinners, are finding themselves laid off or downsized and seeing far fewer options than they expected. We’ll talk with some of them. Get some career coaching. And check in with a labor economist to understand what’s going...

Today we travel along with Music Citizens to go inside the highest stakes job in the industry – A&R. Through the lens and life of A&R lifer Kim Buie, we get to see that this glamorous job is mostly about losing: missing out on artists who become superstars (her near-miss tale of N.W.A. is amazing), knowing that the majority of albums you help shepherd into the world will flop, and being th...

Alex and Eiman Jahangir are brothers, doctors, and two of Nashville’s most remarkable public servants. Both are physicians at Vanderbilt. Alex is an orthopedic surgeon who led the city’s COVID-19 task force. Eiman is a cardiologist and lifelong space enthusiast who eventually got the chance to travel to space. The sons of Iranian immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as preschoolers, the brothers onc...

It’s time for our weekly Roundabout where our panel with an assortment of viewpoints take on the headlines of the week.  If you’re wondering why there’s so much talk about property taxes in Nashville, it’s partly because 2025 taxes were due last week and a lot of homeowners and businesses simply can’t afford it. It’s hard to complain about the value of your property doubling or tripling in the las...

This may be a healthcare town but, even here, figuring our way around the system – affordably – is a real challenge. And it's becoming a greater challenge for many people who've dropped coverage because the Affordable Care Act Marketplace has become anything but affordable. In this episode, we tour our federally-qualified health centers ( FQHCs ) and community clinics, get some help for anyone wit...

A glistening mane flowing over disproportionately top-heavy muscles, bulging under hairless and perfectly-tanned skin. This zeus of a man holds the tiniest of women, also top heavy and surely breathless. No shade on Fabio, but what about the rest of us? The romance genre is seeing a new era. Still every bit as fun — and hot — authors and readers are steering away from "inspiration porn" and toward...

It started with one request to speak to a group of risk analysts. Former Vanderbilt nurse RaDonda Vaught reluctantly told her story on a stage for the first time — she was still on probation from her felony conviction. "It was emotionally overwhelming and a little cathartic, but I'm gonna tell you, you could have heard a pin drop," Vaught tells This Is Nashville . She's gotten used to recounting t...