The Good Neighbors Listen concert series takes place at the East Room on the first and last Saturday of each month until May and focuses on music, wellness and community. The series is hosted by Music Neighbors.
Jason Garriott, co-founder and executive director of Music Neighbors, said this program is very important to him because he lost his father to suicide when he was 12 and picked up the guitar for the first time that summer. He said music gave him a lifeline and helped process the trauma. With Good Neighbors Listen, the organization seeks to help as many people as they can with their mental health by demonstrating the therapeutic powers of music.
“I wanted to dedicate my life to giving back to music because of how much it helped me,” said Garriott. “We got inspired to take our Good Neighbors Listen program and put a live component to it because of our friends, Da’ Healerz. They came out with this album that’s all about mental health and when they did their album release, they gave the community a chance to come together and have mental health discussions. We were surprised by the crowd participation and how much the community really need these kind of events.”
Music Neighbors wanted the event to be free so this could be a community meetup with no financial barriers and to help support the independent music venues in Nashville, too. The event will feature artists performances as they share the meaning behind their songs and how it relates to mental health and their journey. Each show will with a mental health discussion panel with the artists that is led by a licensed therapist. This Saturday (Mar 7) will feature the artists Monarch, Lindsay Liebro and Crystal Rose.
“I think it’s extremely important to talk about mental health as an artist, because everything that happens on the stage is built on something,” Rose said. “If your life off stage is in shambles, you’re not going to be able to do this thing that you love so much for very long. And also music is us sharing about life itself. I think finding a way to transmute the emotions and the experiences that we have really benefits the art itself. I like to write what I know, and just growing up with some of the tough experiences that I’ve had in my childhood, that still impact me today, it’s like this tent on everything. It’s the lens that I see the world through that I’m trying to maybe clear up a little bit or put some words to it. I intellectualize my experiences so much, but I’m not really sure that that’s the best course of action for healing. Being able to put my experiences through music helps me put it back in my body and I think feeling it is really the way through.”
Additional event opportunities:
Starting tonight (Mar 4), Joiner is performing at DRKMTTR and on Thursday night (Mar 5) WNXP Trivia is back at The Blue Room. Also on Thursday WNXP Presents Pete Yorn performing at Cannery Hall’s The Mil. Friday night (Mar 6) Devin the Dude and Nashville rapper Brian Brown are at The Basement East and on Saturday night (Mar 7) Gay Ole Opry is at the OG Basement. Wrap up the weekend Sunday (Mar 8) at the Nashville Jazz Workshop with Jazz Rhapsody and the second annual “Women in Music Unite” is at Rudy’s Jazz Room.
