Rivershed in Killington has been making a name for itself in only a few short years in town. Music is one of the highlights, and this Nashville collaboration has been a huge hit. This Friday July 19 you have a chance to see the fourth of its kind, titled “Nashville Nights”, at 7 p.m. I’ve been fortunate to see all the past ones, and let me tell you it’s an event not to be missed. This one features Kara Tondorf (owner of Rivershed, long-time touring artist who has a song featured on “Dawson’s Creek”), Jade Helliwell (British Country Music Association Female Vocalist of the Year three of the last six years and has over 1 million streams on Spotify), Matt Rogers (shared stages with Chris Stapleton, Walker Hayes and Jake Owen) and Blue Foley (over 100 independent and major label cuts, two Grammy nods and collaborations with Ashley McBryde and Morgan Wallen). Matt and Blue are business partners, and dear friends. I had the pleasure of speaking with Blue, who is the co-creator of “Nashville Nights.” I also got to see him perform last November at Rivershed and he was incredible. I’m not a country music guy, but I’m a big fan of the singer-songwriters who have graced the stage in these events. Blue said, “These songwriter rounds tend to transcend those genre boundaries. It’s just great songs and great music. It doesn’t matter what the genre is.” The next night, July 20, you can see this show at Kara’s other Rivershed in Scituate, Massachusetts. Blue loves his “Rivershed Nights ” and said that Kara has now become a very dear friend and the whole crew is just wonderful. For more information, visit rivershed.com. “Nashville Nights” is like “VH1 Storytellers.” Blue said, “It’s all about the stories behind the songs, and the songs themselves. The whole idea is to create an intimate experience the audience can connect to. You want to wow them.” Honestly that’s the feeling I’ve had leaving these shows. Blue added, “It’s nice to have some great songs performed you can kick back, close your eyes and listen to, but an equally important part of our show is the stories we use to setup those songs because it connects the writer, the human being, to the audience. Normally an artist comes out and performs and everybody is wowed, but there isn’t really a connection to the person. There’s a connection to the artist because they open their heart and let down their walls during that performance but with the songwriter night and the way we designed “Nashville Nights” it’s a completely walls down, vulnerable show as to here is my human being person and my take on the human condition concerning this topic that the song covers.”
The beauty of these shows is the intimacy of them. It’s definitely a listening show. Blue said, “You get to peek behind the curtain. It feels like you’re backstage with us in the green room before we go play, and that’s fun.”
“NN” has enabled Blue to meet artists and writers who he wouldn’t have necessarily written with, that now he’s become friends with. He started “NN” in Denmark with his partner Stefan Mork in the Fall of 2019. He went on a run with his great friend Ashley McBryde, on her first European tour. Blue has written a bunch of songs with her. Another friend of Blue’s, Cheley Tackett, who has been a huge part of all things “Nashville Nights,” was opening four shows on that tour. Blue jokingly asked Cheley if he could jump in her suitcase. Stefan was the one who suggested they start “NN.” Blue said, “Stefan said we should do a singer-songwriter style round in Denmark and call it ‘Nashville Nights.’I jumped on a plane with Cheley and we got on Ashley’s bus, man it was fun, we did Hamburg, Germany, Berlin, Germany and ended the tour in Amsterdam. Stefan flew into Amsterdam where Cheley opened and Ashley did an amazing sold-out show. Stefan and Ashley met, we all took pictures, did the elbow-rubbing and then Cheley, Stefan and I flew to Denmark and started “Nashville Nights.” We did one house concert that made more money than both of the venues we played, which were small bars. That’s how we started ‘NN.’”
In August of 2020, they did another show in Denmark and everything had doubled. They went back again, and it doubled again. In those first three trips, Blue met Anna Hansen who he said was an amazing Icelandic citizen. She too is a singer-songwriter, who is a member of Aqua. They got to be friends and Anna went to Nashville and did some writing with Blue. Blue said, “It was three years ago that I told her we needed to do a ‘NN’ in Iceland.”
So two months ago they took NN to Iceland and did two sold-out shows there. Kara and Matt were on both of those shows. Blue said, “It was really amazing. We did really well with only four weeks of social media advertising, We sold both venues out, and we’d never been there before. That was really exciting. It took us three years but by god we pulled it off.” They have another trip planned September 11-14 in Denmark at seven established venues.
Blue said the audiences were incredible in Iceland. They all speak English very well. Blue said, “They got all the stories, all the innuendo. What was so fun is that because Anna and her sister Frida, who also is an amazing artist, were on the Iceland shows, we got to do songs in English as Americans but they did songs in Icelandic and that was really special. Frida did a song which is on Icelandic radio now, “Summer is Gone”, because Iceland has nine months of winter and half are completely in the dark. It’s kind of a funny song. Not only did we get the crowd up cheering and singing in their native tongue but Matt did a song, “You’re my Hallelujah” and the crowd stood up because there’s a choir part, and they’re clapping along. I’m telling you, Iceland gets it. It was an absolutely incredible experience.” Because it was so successful, they’re going back in December. This time they’ll do a show in the summer which has 20 hours of daylight and a show in the winter which is 20 hours of nighttime.
“Nashville Nights” is getting its own radio channel online at radiosobro.com. There’s also a free app on Google Play and on Apple’s app store Blue’s very good friend Kyle Creamer started the station with his dad to promote original music created by Nashville’s singer-songwriter community. Blue said, “Kyle is giving me my very own content channel. We’re going to do really cool things like interview the songwriters behind the song so they get the story, then play the songwriter’s version of the song and then play the major label version of the song. That’s a really exciting thing that’s up and coming. We’re doing it in a live studio environment so we’ll have a YouTube channel to go with that and it will be all things ‘Nashville Nights.’” That should be up and running in the next 30-60 days. There will be a podcast, the songwriter stories or you’ll be able to listen to songs from their artists. Blue added, “Right now we have 12,000 songs that have been cut, recorded and singled by people we’ve taken to Denmark and ‘Nashville Nights.’ So we have a huge playlist of songwriters who haven’t signed their first publishing deal to Songwriter of the Year Lee Thomas Miller and Bobby Pinson. The entire catalog will be available on that ‘Nashville Nights’ playlist. It’s really going to be exciting.”
For more info on “Nashville Nights,” visit nnisf.org. To find out more about Blue, his Instagram is under his name but his Facebook and YouTube are under Blue Foley Music.
