Troubadour Black applies his own style

CASEY BLACK stands in the yard of his gorgeously tumbledown Tennessee farmhouse, luxuriating in the silence. “You can come out here and scream and nobody will hear you,” he chuckles in a tone that suggests shouting at the vast western skies is something he contemplates on a weekly – possibly daily – basis.

“Me and my wife moved here from Brooklyn,” he continues. “We initially thought about going to Nashville proper. She wasn’t too impressed with that. We found this place: she really loved it. After about a week living in a house where you don’t have any neighbours, it occurred to us that we liked not having any neighbours.”

The sensitive troubadour is a Nashville native, though is open about having a conflicted relationship with his hometown and its musical heritage. His father, Charlie, is a hugely respected country songwriter. Casey assumed he would follow his father into the family business and that he would work on Music Row, Nashville’s famed neighborhood of songwriting ‘factories’ where the hits of tomorrow are assembled with forensic precision. He quickly discovered he wasn’t that sort of musician – and soon left Nashville, half suspecting he’d never return. He studied at Columbia University in New York, living in the city for over a decade.