2 Years After Route 91, Nashville's Artistic Community Is Still Learning How To Heal
About an hour outside of Nashville, in the hills of Middle Tennessee, you'll find a sprawling compound of cabins and farmhouses with red roofs; a place where horses run the pastures and mist tends to settle in the valleys between the hills. If it weren't for the work that happens here, this could be a vacation retreat for Nashville's entertainment industry – a getaway from the trappings of daily life, to disconnect and forget the world outside. But here, at OnSite Workshops, the idea isn't to leave your life behind, but to process everything that's happened in it.
Two years ago this month, after the massacre at Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas that killed 58, OnSite's campus became one of Nashville's most crucial destinations. Along with organizations like Porter's Call, MusiCares, Music Health Alliance (all which often work in close collaboration with each other) as well as other groups focused on mental health and trauma therapy, OnSite helped musicians and their crews heal in the wake of the unfathomable. In the time since, those artists have had to balance this healing process with the constant pressure to stay on the road, make new music and deliver for their fans — to be "ok" when their circumstances are anything but.
"I worked with some artists who were terrified to go on stage again," says Miles Adcox, owner and CEO of OnSite. "Really scared of meet-and-greets. Asking, 'How do we amp up security?' That's a normal response, because this was historically a safe environment that now feels like what we can't deny is an unsafe one." Since Route (at least) dozens more mass shootings — a term which lacks a definition, making it impossible for tallies to be definitive, though the FBI offers — including several at music festivals and music events such as the Gilroy Garlic Festival this past July, three were killed.
