About This

What is Whatever Nashville?

Some folks curating a source for independent art, weird experiences, oddities, strange happenings, and whatever culture in Nashville, TN.

That’s nice… but brass tacks. What do you do?

We send an email out every Friday about unique, free-to-$30 events occurring on the weekend and following week.

The first section is too ambiguous. What kind of events?

Street events, puppet shows, interactive art shows, cinema in unexpected places, parades, art openings, outlaw dancing, bike rides, drag life, guerrilla theater, burlesque + variety shows, costume balls, those kinds of parties, queer stuff, open mics sometimes, random acts of weirdness, absurdist pranks, and other oddities that tickles our fancy.

But muh personal data! Can’t you just make an Instagram account for me to follow?

Nah. Emails are personal–and that’s cool. We want you to feel invited. That’s the vibe.

Oh, we promise not to sell your email address or give it away. We don’t know how nor do we have time. And we don’t spam you with crap. That’s annoying.

Okay I’ve signed up! Now what?

Wait for the email.

When do you send it out again?

Every Friday at some point.

What if I have an event I want to post?

Whatever Nashville happens because of you and the things the community do. This works because you tell us about the events and experiences you’re putting on plus the cool thing you’re attending next week.

Please keep us in the loop. Don’t assume we heard about it. Our moms think we’re cool, but that’s about it.

We won’t list stuff that costs more than $30, missing door code info, RSVP info, or special arrangements. There are some exceptions to the rule, but we’ll caveat where appropriate.

We’re here to gather, organize, and filter with prejudice. Your job is to make/host/throw interesting events and then holler at us.

When you’re ready to send your thing in, give the important details like address, time, name of the thing, and a brief description of what’s going on. If there's a link, we'd appreciate that too. When you get that all together, email everything in the body of the message in text to will@whatevernashville.com.

Please don’t send PDFs, JPEGS, mp4s, mp3s, or any other kind of attachments. We don’t do that here.

Hold up! My band/event/party/opening/shenanigans sent you something and you didn’t post it. Why? How do you pick what goes in the email?

We’re here to support the artists, independents, and the DIYs who make Nashville interesting. The music scene has a lot of support already. We're doing this thing to support the other kind of artists who make this city vibe.

Big-money-backed events, organizations, art galleries and museums, big street festivals, and all that stuff, it’s easy to find info on them. It's probably why you won't see it here.

There’s an informal formal rule of three we follow, but basically says that the events we like will have three things going on: DJs, bands, dancers, costumes, theater, art, film, fire breathers, projections, burlesque, body paintings, poetry, walk offs, unusual spaces, or other indefinables that make something interesting.

Your thing doesn’t need everything on here to be listed, or have three things going on all at the same time necessarily. If you have anxiety or doubt about it, send it over, we can help.

Where do you find it? How do you write it all?

We find a lot of stuff through scouring sites, personal connections, but mostly, it’s what you, the people of Nashville, email us.

Also, we don’t write much, just edit.

Do you go to all the events?

Nope, but we support what we can. You should too.

Also, we do not endorse everything we share.

Will I have fun at everything I go to? Which ones are good and which ones are bad?

Maybe. Sometimes. Probably not. But also yes.

Honestly we just don’t know–and have no way of knowing. A lot of stuff will be/can be amateur hour, but that’s also the point.

So who are you?

My name is Will. I live in Nashville. I compile the list for now. As this thing grows, I’ll ask some people to help.

But why do you say “we”? You’re just one person.

Listen, we like to think that this thing, whatever it is, is about all of us. Yeah, we hit the send button for the newsletter each week, but it takes all of us to make this odyssey work and be so dreamy.

So therefore, we.

Wow, aren’t you cool. Y’all come up with this all by yourself?

Not even close. We’re standing on the shoulders of other underground giants. Nashville, to our knowledge, doesn’t have anything like this, which is absurd for the amount of creative people living and doing things here.

Why are you doing this? What do you get out of it?

Nashville is more than just bachelorette parties, country music, and alcohol poisoning. When we moved here, we were frustrated by the lack of resources for alternative events because c’mon, there are tons of creative people here doing really cool things, but we didn’t know where to look. There are creative communities in this city that don’t know about each other and connecting them together seemed like something we could contribute.

The dream with this? To connect the weird and creative folks in Nashville, encourage others to do and create something, and hopefully contribute to this city's artistic culture for lightyears into the future.

We’re drawn to those who are doing, whatever it is they’re doing, on their own or with their group. We want to support the amateurs, participatory culture, and multimedia arts.

Also, we’re not anti-commercial entertainment. We love TV, movies, concerts–but everything has their place. We think life is richer when you’re treated less like a walking wallet and rather a patron of a fellow human’s art.

So what do we get out of it? Weird, cool stuff to do every week.

So how much money are you making off this?

That’s not the point of it. There will never be any paid ads. There will never be any data selling. There will never be whatever else there could be. That’s so much work and we’d rather spend our time finding creative things for y’all to do this week.

But straight up, it does cost money to pay for the server space, web hosting, and software. You can donate here if you’d like to help.

The newsletter will always be free. We do this out of love, but we would appreciate the support.

I want to speak to your manager, I have a complaint.

Hahahahahaha.

Oh no! I’m not getting Whatever Nashville emails.

It’s fine, relax, we’ll try and troubleshoot this right here and now.

First, check your Spam Filter. If there, click on whatever button to move it to your inbox and you should be good, but check back next week just in case. If it’s not there, let’s try a few things.

First step is to either approve messages from us or add our address to your address book or whitelist. That doesn’t work either? Hmm.

Second step is to create another email account from one of the big companies like Gmail or Yahoo. Don’t want to? Okay.

Third step is to email your provider and see why they keep flagging it.

Now if you marked it as spam, well, thanks for playing, but that’s on you.

And if none of that works, make friends with someone who does have a working email.

Best of luck!

Thanks for your help in making the creative community thrive.

Cheers,

Will