Nashville isn’t a music town often associated with crushed velvet drapes and extravagant chandeliers, but somehow Analog - the Hutton Hotel’s second floor showroom on West End Ave. - pulls off its luxurious look while keeping it real. On a recent evening during Americanafest, I checked in with James, the venue’s always dapper host. The tastefully lit room hummed with anticipation. The emerging Georgia duo The Band Loula, launching on a major label, was about to take the stage. Patrons, band family and friends, and a party of glammy young ladies filled the venue to standing room.
Two things stood out once the music started. Artist and audience seemed as close as they could be without getting inappropriate. “It felt like we were sitting in the living room by a fireplace together,” said the duo’s Logan Simmons. Indeed, even with its full professional production, the set felt like a show in a private home, albeit a pretty swanky one. Unlike most house concerts, the sound was spectacular. Analog might have the city’s best live performance audio system, installed by Michael Cronin, who has designed and built famous studios across the globe.
“There's millions of dollars in the design, the shape of the wall, the materials,” says Meredith DiMenna, the venue’s director of marketing and programming for the past four years. “That's why it sounds so good, because it's basically built like a recording studio. There are no reflections. That beautiful mural (opposite the stage) is a sound reinforcing wall. The curtain is a functional thing. It's not just there to be pretty.”
It’s a play room that ain’t playin’. Analog, built in 2017 into the otherwise lifeless concrete box that is the Hutton Hotel’s parking garage, had started finding its feet before the pandemic’s prolonged shutdown. Since its recovery, under DiMenna’s curatorial vision, Analog has found a niche and identity in Music City’s shifting venue scene. While some have the impression that it’s only a special event space, it’s actually open to the public most nights of the week with a slate of artists from across the genres. It’s a regular home for the popular Pitch Meeting open mic show, and Sundays feature Analog Soul featuring DJ Smoke and Will Davenport.
I find myself there more and more frequently. This year, besides two nights of Americanafest sets, including mesmerizing performances by Kyshona and Leslie Jordan, I’ve seen bluegrass fiddler and breakout bandleader Jason Carter play one of his string of residency shows, and a blazing night of southern roots rock from today’s underrated iteration of Little Feat. That was a taping for the PBS series Recorded Live At Analog, another feather in the venue’s cap, now airing its second season and shooting its third.
“There's no other venue that does what we do and we don't do what other venues do. We’re the city’s showcase room,” DiMenna told me in a September interview. “The owners (of the Hutton) love this hotel, and they gave me the directive that they wanted to create an icon. I wanted them to understand that I thought it was really important to present Analog as a complement to the rest of the market. Analog doesn’t have any ‘competitors’.”
They’re making it work with a synergistic business model that shares costs and upside with the hotel’s other amenities and revenue streams, from heads in beds, to the recently renovated Evelyn’s restaurant, to a secret weapon - two Writer’s Studios, outfitted with quality gear and appointed by country star Dierks Bentley in one case and pop/rock standout Ryan Tedder in the other.
“A common thing is someone who's from L.A. or from New York coming to Nashville to write with Nashville people. And they'll stay in the hotel, and they'll book the studio, and then they'll have all their co-writers meet them,” DiMenna says. “And sometimes people just write in there because it's a good vibe. Other times they will actually lay down like demo tracks. The most famous (example) is that Maren Morris recorded the vocals for ‘The Middle’ there. So that was the hit that we got!”
Sometimes, artists block out the entire hotel for fan club weekends, with events throughout. “The one that we work with the most right now is (R&B/pop artist) Allen Stone, who's taken over the Hutton twice and basically sold the entire weekend as like the Allen Stone Experience. They call it the Globetrot,” DiMenna says. “And so everybody's here for him, and they do two shows in Analog. There's a cocktail party in the Hutton Suite. Then he does listening sessions in the writers’ studio.” Even before her time, Hutton courted the music industry and hosted stars playing the Bridgestone Arena. Carrie Underwood, Luke Combs, and Thomas Rhett have had private events and listening parties in the space.
It’s the roots and jazz programming that’s been drawing me back to the venue. Just last week I attended the release party for Kite’s Keep, the newest album from eclectic acoustic guitarist Ben Garnett. His original instrumental music blurred the lines between composed chamber music, bluegrass and string band jazz, ranging from lush and lyrical to deliciously cryptic. And I’ll always remember seeing Nashville drummer/composer Sophia Goodman leading her nine-piece band as she introduced her album Secrets of the Shore a few years back. In both cases, the Analog sound system presented the musicians with astonishing tonal accuracy and transparency.
Both shows were reasonably well attended - nowhere near capacity, but they were special for audience and artist. “I wouldn't be able to take those chances if I had all the other operational costs that had to come out of Analog’s profits,” says DiMenna. “Most hotels are paying junior level artists to play in the lobby or baby bands to play in the bar. That's not what we're doing at Analog. We had to have a completely different strategy.”
DiMenna transplanted to Nashville in 2016 with experience as a concert promoter, scene-maker and recording artist built up in the unique environs of Bridgeport, CT, in the same county where she grew up. After living in and rocking out in New York and Los Angeles, she moved to Bridgeport with a plan to get involved and up its game as a cultural hub. “The city was trying to reinvent itself, and they decided to do an artist housing program,” she tells WMOT. “You could get a huge loft for, like, 1000 bucks a month. And my partner and I applied, and we were accepted, and we started a recording studio in our loft.” Soon she made a proposal to take over the booking of a summer concert series that she knew had been suffering from a mismatch of programming (fancy suburban) and place (multi-ethnic inner city).
“We had In Living Color, Eddie Palmieri, De La Soul and Ashford & Simpson. And it was fantastic. Everybody came. It was phenomenal. It was community,” she says. “So that was kind of the beginning for me of thinking that I could leverage myself as a performer and use my business interests to have an impact.”
DiMenna secured her spot in Music City with a job as head of marketing for Compass Records, allowing her to move here with her husband and new daughter. While scoping out spots for a showcase for soul/roots singer-songwriter Mike Farris, she discovered Analog and became an enthusiastic client. When the chance came to join the hotel in 2022, she offered plenty of input as the organization brought its pieces into harmony.
“We don't make as much money or do anything as successfully, except when we're all together,” she observes. “So when the whole hotel is firing, it's like, whoa. We're beyond the sum of our parts.”
Season Two of Recorded Live At Analog is ongoing on PBS nationally and locally, with shows that include Molly Tuttle and Ketch Secor, George Thorogood & The Destroyers, and Chase Rice. Filming for Season Three is underway. Here's a recent episode.
