Nashville is the case study. Your industry is the thesis.
THE DISPATCH
View From Nashville is honest reporting on what the creative economy is doing to human creativity — and what human creativity can do about it. Nashville is the entry point. It's the most transparent case study available for a collapse happening in every creative field, right now.
WHY THIS EXISTS
I helped build a business in this town, then told the truth about how it was being run. I was fired for it. The person at the top told me directly I'd have a hard time finding work in Nashville again. She was right — I'm still persona non grata in parts of Lower Broadway.
That firing taught me how this town actually operates: top-down, loyalty-tested, allergic to anyone who won't stay quiet. The confirmation came from an unlikely place — a study ranking Nashville the fourth least authentic city in the world. It matched exactly what ten years in the industry had already shown me. That was the last straw.
So I turned the camera outward. Not another hot take — a data-driven case, one argument at a time. That's View From Nashville.
I showed that I cannot be controlled, and I will not hide their secrets.
THE MANIFESTO
For 25 years I've worked inside an industry that rewards conformity, punishes honesty, and mistakes compliance for craft. VFN is what I built when I got tired of waiting for someone else to say it out loud.
Nashville is where I report from. But the story — what happens to human creators when the systems that were supposed to support them turn predatory — is happening everywhere, in every creative field, right now. This is the beat nobody inside the machine is supposed to cover. I cover it because I built a life that doesn't require their permission.
WHAT THIS COVERS
Institutional corruption — how concentrated power in creative industries extracts value from artists while offering belonging as the price of compliance
The conformity tax — the identity cost of staying inside systems that require you to become someone else to survive
Human creativity under pressure — what it means to stay relevant, essential, and irreducibly human when machine-generated content scales infinitely
The survival model — proof there's another way, built from the inside, without institutional permission
WHY ME
Twenty-five years inside the entertainment machine. Ten and a half of them in Nashville. Roughly 5,000 live performances. I'm not observing this industry from the outside — I'm still performing, still booking, still inside the system I'm reporting on.
New Vaudeville, The Wizard of Whimsy, the Acoustic Singing Telegram — these aren't just opinions about what survives when a system turns predatory. They're the survival, documented in real time.
I'm not just the reporter. I'm the case study.
READ THE DISPATCHES
Every episode drops with a companion essay — the video is the argument, the essay is the evidence.
Want to back independent reporting directly? Founding Member support starts at $7/month.