A chance encounter on a hotel elevator solidified Paul Moak’s resolve to move to Nashville.
I had a friend that worked for a management company that was birthed in Mississippi that ended up up here and he was like the… what do you call it, like when a band has a fan club, he was like the guy that would box up t-shirts and mail them off to for some label.
And so I called him and told him I was in town and he said “we have tickets to a show tonight that no one in the office can go to. Do you and your dad want to go?” It was at this place called Starwood that used to be out off 24 and Bell Road that was Nashville's outdoor amphitheater. It was like maybe 10 or 10,000 maybe, but like the kind with seats and then grass up in the back.
And and he was like “It's the Counting Crows with The Wallflowers opening,” and this was when they were the biggest… like when he was dating like all the girls in friends and Long December was like everywhere… so me and my dad went to that show and I sat on the second row and it was just like this life-changing thing of like
“This is the town I need to be in. This is real music.”
And and we got back to the hotel the Loews because his thing was in the convention center which was attached to the Loews and we get in the elevator and it's both bands going up to their rooms and I just been at the show and they had no idea. And there were two girls in the elevator that we're talking about how bad the sound was at the show and I kind of looked at the the one of the dudes from The Wallflowers and he was just (shh), and we went up and they got off on their floor or whatever but it was like as a 16 or 17 year old kid, I was like I'm already in it. You know I've been here 30 seconds and I’m already in it.
So I had my mind made up and from then on. It was like I got to get back to Nashville.