This is an unusual song – being the lead single from Kasey Anderson’s new album ‘To the Places We Lived’ which he has stated is the final album he’ll be making after almost 25 years of pursuing a musical career. it’s an album of very personal songs – in the sense of being autobiographical but also for being made with people who mattered to Kasey Anderson. It’s also an unusual album for being worked on for quite some tine, as Kasey explained to Americana UK: “I wanted ‘To the Places We Lived’ to be a solo record — to have my name on it, because I was no longer ashamed or embarrassed to have it on something I made — I also wanted to make room in the songs for all of those people with whom I had been intertwined. I wanted them as present in the songs as they’d been in my life. We got together, some of us, at Jackpot! in Portland (where we made Nowhere Nights), the week before Easter, 2019. Andrew McKeag was there. Jordan Richter, of course. Jesse Moffat. Will Moore, who had been a traveling member of the Honkies during our last summer together. Casey Neill, who I somehow had never been in a band with despite numerous intersections. That group put down the basic tracks and then I started to call in other friends who lived nearby. Jenny Conlee-Drizos, Joy and Rebecca from Lenore. Emily Overstreet. Dave Jorgensen. Kyleen King. Once the record felt done to me, I put things on pause for what I thought would be just a few months to help look after my dad, but then he was gone, and then we learned my wife was pregnant, and then a few weeks later everyone was stuck inside their homes sanitizing their groceries and wondering if we’d ever get back together again. When we finally did get back together again, the record no longer felt done to me and so I decided to just keep making cool shit with my friends until it did feel done”
Of the song, Kasey says: “I’ve been doing this — making up songs, recording them, and singing them for people — to varying degrees of success since I was 20 years old. I’m 44 now, so nearly 25 years. At some point during that time, I can’t even accurately recall when, Nashville became the central hub for most things “Americana” and adjacent. The city has always been rich in Country Music History (and Country Music Revisionist History), but the absorption of Americana into that felt much to me like what happened with Grunge in the 1990s, out in the Pacific Northwest where I grew up. People migrate to a place, to a scene, to where the work is — or to where they hope the work will be. I had a lot of friends move out to Nashville in the last couple decades and a few of them have really left a mark on that city, and on the genre; have done what I consider to be really meaningful, impactful work and made art that I think folks will still be talking about in fifty years. A lot of my friends who moved out there, though, are still spinning their wheels. That’s not a knock on any of them, that’s the way the business works. “Back to Nashville” is a tune about a little bit of time I spent in that city, and the realization that I didn’t have any desire to move anywhere in order to “make it.” That, in fact, I didn’t care at all whether I “made it” or not. When I got out of prison, I moved back to Portland, where I grew up. I’ve spent the last eight years there; I’ve got a wife and a kid and I work in communities I care very much about. That’s “making it” by any definition I can muster. This is a song about trading a dream that didn’t feel all that fulfilling in the first place for a life that does.”
