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Charles Esten: The Road To Nashville

You’ll know him as Deacon Claybourne from the hit TV show, Nashville, but before landing the role of a lifetime, he found himself starring in comedy improv show, Whose Line Is It Anyway – complete with Buddy Holly hair. For Charles Esten, each part of his journey to Nashville represent pieces of a puzzle...

Nashville’s bustling streets are usually filled with the sounds of country music – each honky tonk’s tunes vying for the attention of the revelers on the street. Until March 2020 – when a haunting silence descended on the capital made famous for being the music centre of Tennessee.

“It's very, very eerie,” agrees Charles ‘Chip’ Esten, who is happy to report that he’s “healthy and hunkered down” in Nashville during the lockdown period.

“It's very difficult because this place is a live wire; this place has electricity going through it. You walk down – not just Broadway, downtown – but many other streets, and you hear music in the streets, you hear it coming out the doors, you hear the greatest musicians in the world. There's a lot of folks that are hurting right now because they not only get to make music from their heart, but they support their family by going on the road as touring musicians or studio musicians. There's countless crew, bus drivers and everybody that’s a part of this massive industry, but also this massive family called country music. We're going to have to make sure that we all take care of those folks as well as they go through these hard times.”

Esten is finding the current situation incredible surreal:

“It's hard to wrap your head around where we are right now. The thing that we're starting to see now more than ever is the hearts of people – reaching out to each other, lifting each other up and taking care of each other. That grace and kindness – person to person – that you're starting to see makes all of this bearable.”

When the official lockdown news descended and all music venues were immediately closed, Esten was in London preparing to play at the Country To Country Festival at London’s O2 Arena, which was swiftly called off and rescheduled for the following year.

“Getting to be on that main stage, that’s a bucket list type thing for me,” he admits. “So you would expect that I'd be fairly devastated by it. But in the perspective of the grand and global scale, with what many people are going through, this isn’t something that you can really call devastating. This is just something we've all had to adjust to. It's sad, but the good news is they've got their headliners back for next year and they're going to do their very best.

“I just pray that we come through this and we get to the other side in such a way that it means that yes, it can absolutely go on next year,” he adds. “That thing is going to be a celebration and it's gonna be very, very emotional. We will have been through so much by then, and music can be extremely cathartic. So I hope that that is able to happen. But in the meanwhile, it's folks like you that are playing and sharing that country music, so there’s a connection. There is something healing about it and something that helps you process the hardest things. All music does, but country music seems to have an extra special gift at that.”

Nashville was a real life-changer for me; and the role I'd been preparing myself for.

Best known for his starring role as Deacon Claybourne on CMT's Nashville, which kickstarted his own musical career, Esten has stayed put in Nashville despite the show ending two years ago. He feels that his whole career before that led up to that role:

Nashville was just a real life-changer for me, and the sort of the show and the role that I'd probably been preparing myself for,” he reflects. “I've often felt like over the years, I collected these little scraps of cardboard, these odd shapes with colors on them. Tiny little pieces. And then at one point, I pulled them out and put them on a table and they were puzzle pieces. And I put them all together and they were Nashville. Because every little job I did, every little song I wrote, every little bit of guitar I learned – all these different things went into playing this guy, Deacon, and it changed my life.”

Looking back, Esten reflects on the fact that he hasn’t always been a prolific songwriter:

“I gotta admit that it wasn't until I was much older that I wrote songs,” he remembers. “I was just doing it whenever the moment would strike, or whenever I would think of an idea. And that's not how the professionals really do it, they sit down to write, whether they have an idea or not. And they find a song. So years later, I started doing that. That started about seven years before I got a script for Nashville. It could not have been more perfect for me to come to this city and meet all these great writers, musicians and producers and be able to pick up this music career that I'd let go of so long ago and start afresh. It's been a dream.”

Before landing the role of a lifetime, Esten’s theatrical debut in London saw him portray Buddy Holly – singing, acting and playing guitar – in the hit West End musical Buddy, which then led to an unexpected stint on popular UK comedy improv series, Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Although referring to himself as a comedian as being something of a “subjective” matter, Esten was an instant hit, and when Whose Line came to ABC, he became a recurring cast member and frequent song improvisor. Since then he has appeared on Drew Carey’s Improvaganza and toured frequently, performing live improv shows with Stiles, Proops and Jeff B. Davis.

“I ended up on that show while I was playing Buddy, so if you ever go back and see those old episodes, I've got permed black hair, because I've been playing Buddy Holly during those nights,” he laughs. “I didn't have any idea that it would turn into this thing that went back to the states and supported my family. I was part of that for years and years. Some of the best friends I have in my life are from Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Eston has always loved acting, but it’s a definite second to music:

“It was always my hope that I would get to do both,” he elaborates. “When Buddy finished, I went back to LA, still doing Whose Line where I got to sing and literally write songs off the top of my head. But for years and years in between, it was impossible to find that in acting. I always figured I'd run into some bandmates and I'd be able to put together a plan and get back to the music, but that never happened – it wasn't time.”

A shift in prioritising songwriting saw the stars align:

“I focused on songwriting again and put that out to the universe. I very clearly remember saying to my wife, ‘when am I ever going to get to go to Nashville to play music? That's never going to happen’. And of course, we know the ending to that is that it happened in spades! I got to come here and play Deacon, and pretty soon I was in The Bluebird all the time playing music as Deacon! It’s a real story that I try to wrap my head around, but I've quit trying. I'm just grateful at this point!”

Esten says he very much wants to be on the “optimist train” with regards to making the best out of the current situation, and has been picking up his guitar while at home, almost absentmindedly playing covers of his favourite songs:

“I’m mostly playing familiar music that gives me a connection, and then as I'm playing all those songs, invariably my hands find different chords and new tunes and melodies. I haven't come around to writing any lyrics yet. Those take a little longer in terms of processing what you're feeling. It's hard. It's much harder to verbalize than it is to music-ise something.”