Nashville!

Last week I was in Nashville, Tennessee speaking at Voices That Matter, a fine web design conference hosted by the folks at Peachpit.

The conference was great, of course. Some amazing people worked on (and around) my book and I was happy to have a chance to meet and thank them in person. That's you, Michael Nolan, Wendy Sharp, Nancy Ruenzel and Glenn Bisignani.

I was also really excited about digging into some of the culture of Nashville, paying a visit to the Hatch Show Print shop, looking at guitars and eating barbecue. So what follows is a short photo tour of my 2.5 days in Nashville.

Visting Hatch was the highlight of the trip for me. My first stop there, with Dan Brown and Jeremy Keith, was a disappointment. Here we are loitering outside the shop:

Turns out that everything cool in Nashville closes at five.

I took a cab down the next day to make sure I'd have time to look around and soak up Hatch's inky greatness. It's not a huge place, but its long history is all over the walls:

I bought two prints, Rodeo and Exclamation (pictures coming sometime... no promises), and a coffee mug.

A couple of blocks away, just across from the Country Music Hall of Fame, there's a Johnny Cash mural on a long, low purple building. It was torn up and distressed, and a lot more interesting because of it:

Here's a picture of the whole mural:

And then back on Broadway, there's the Ernest Tubb Record Shop. It looks authentic in every way except for the domain name on the marquee.

And inside the ETRS was this vaguely creepy display of fancy suits worn by yesterday's country music stars. (Not that I wouldn't love to have that Marty Stuart embroidered horseshoe number on the far right.)

Finally, not far from my hotel was a full-scale replica of the Parthenon:

I wish I'd gone inside; it looks impressive.

Overall, I really enjoyed Nashville. I hope to get back there sometime to visit the Gibson outlet store and, of course, make another stop at Hatch.