Nashville Lifestyles Magazine February 2021

I am writing you a couple of weeks after the Christmas bombing. As we prepare to go to press, I am still processing what has happened. As a Nashville native, I’ve spent a lot of my life downtown. My grandfather’s business was downtown on Demonbreun. My high school, Hume-Fogg, is on Broadway. Four of the most formative years of my life were set against the backdrop of downtown Nashville. I remember downtown before it was revived. Broadway was sketchy to say the least, long before becoming the honky-tonk bars and bachelorette capitol of America. Back in the 1990s I went on dates at The Spaghetti Factory and The Melting Pot. Seeing the images brought back a lot of ’90s memories. If I am rambling a bit on my trip down memory lane,…

Ahh, love. At the risk of sounding too corny, it truly is what the world needs now. To do our part, we’ve packed this issue with so much love your heart might burst (in a good, cartoon-y type of way). Our cover couple, Luke and Nicole Combs, are sharing their own love story—including the hysterical details of their nearly botched engagement and their difficult decision to completely change their wedding plans and find a way to safely tie the knot amidst a global pandemic. These two have so much chemistry, and I know you will leave this interview the same way I did: wishing I could go on a double date with them and spend the evening cracking up over a few drinks. We’ve also got an interview with music industry power couple…

Within a month of Chief of Police John Drake’s new position as the head of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, a suicide bomber detonated an explosive on Second Avenue, destroying one of our city’s most vibrant thoroughfares. Drake’s officers were on the scene where they were miraculously able to roust sleeping residents and save every life before the bomb exploded. That’s on top of a highway shooting that took an innocent life, a global pandemic that has hit Tennessee especially hard, and ongoing civil unrest. To say his first 30 days in office were busy is an understatement. “They told me there would be a honeymoon period where I’d be shaking hands and kissing babies,” Drake says. “I’ve always told people I like challenges, but I tell you what, they’re coming.” Drake,…

The Frist Art Museum is kicking off its 20th anniversary year with Picasso. Figures, an exhibition from the esteemed collection of the Musée national Picasso-Paris. From Feb. 5 through May 2, the exhibit will be displayed in Frist’s Ingram Gallery for its sole nationwide appearance; it will offer an in-depth look at Pablo Picasso’s career-long fascination with the human figure as a means of expressing a range of subjects and emotions. The exhibition features approximately 75 paintings, works on paper, and sculptures. Highlights include masterpieces from Picasso’s various styles and periods, in addition to more intimate works that offer fresh insight into his innovative practice. “Viewers will see how, as Picasso continuously deconstructed and then remade the body, he was also recasting the history of figuration as a combination of his own psychological…

With a pandemic, tornado ,and bomb blast all terrifying the city last year, Nashville felt on edge for most of 2020—and many of our artists felt the same. But folk troubadour Langhorne Slim found the light at the end of the tunnel with Strawberry Mansion. Marking Slim’s seventh album, the project was both deeply personal and a document of the times, addressing a world in turmoil and also a long battle with anxiety, depression, and prescription drug abuse. That fight had all but blunted Slim’s razor-sharp creativity before the album, and yet somehow, Strawberry Mansion finds him reclaiming his own playful, whimsical identity. It’s full of bounding optimism even as it rips the bandage off some still-painful wounds. And that hope is something we could all use. “Through all the tragedy of…

The Three Mothers by Anna Malaika Tubbs (Flatiron Books) Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin were three of the most influential men of the 20th century, advocating for the voices and rights of Black Americans. But little is known about their mothers. Tubbs researched the lives of Alberta King, Louise Little, and Berdis Baldwin, to reveal the public and private lives of the women responsible for shaping the men who set out to reshape the country. (Available Feb. 2) Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 edited by Ibram X. Kendi & Keisha N. Blain (One World) Featuring the voices of 80 Black writers and 10 Black poets, Four Hundred Souls records the history of Black America, starting with the arrival of the first slaves…