Music helps process emotion
Nashville star Charles Esten talks about love, loss and the power of music to Fleur Mealing.
For Charles Esten the power of music isn’t just a cliche, it’s real. The star of TV show Nashville says his dreams came true when he landed the role of Deacon Claybourne on the hit show; dreams, plural.
‘‘Music was always the other part of my dreams [as well as acting], so this is a bunch of dreams come true at the same time for me,’’ says Esten.
‘‘We are very fortunate because whenever we reach a certain place in a scene where maybe you have said all you can, well sometime with a guitar you can say a little bit more and we get that opportunity to go a little deeper the way only music can take you.’’
But after four seasons, American network ABC cancelled the cult show – to the dismay of the cast.
‘‘I was really torn up: we didn’t think the stories were done being told and we didn’t think the songs were done being sung,’’ he says.
Fans agreed. Petitions began worldwide to bring back the show. Within a month, network Country Music Television (CMT) had picked up the show for a fifth season.
Esten said the move to CMT was like finding an even more appropriate home for the show.
But co-star Connie Britton who played show lead Rayna Jaymes and Esten’s on-screen wife, had decided it was her time to leave.
Britton’s character died suddenly midway through season five.
‘‘It was hard because we weren’t just saying goodbye to a character but also a friend,’’ says Esten.
Her death scene (after a car crash), was, says Esten ‘‘brutal, I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve never has a scene remotely that difficult’’.
‘‘There were big tough crew members with tears running down their face as we were filming.’’
Alongside Esten and Britton in the final scenes were on and off screen sisters Lennon and Maisy Stella, who play Rayna’s daughters Maddie and Daphne. SUPPLIED
In final moments the trio sang A Life That’s Good, a song all four had sang together in past episodes.
Esten admitted the song was his favourite to perform as it really captured the heart of the show.
‘‘[On the show] you have a bunch of people trying to make it big in the music business, but along they keep finding that maybe all that stuff is not as important as the few things that you need to have a life that’s good.
‘‘Like all great songs, this song says it so simply, so perfectly and so beautifully.’’
The actor says he ‘‘selfishly’’ has another favourite, one he had written and performed live on the show .
I Know How to Love You Now was co-written by country star Deana Carter and was Deacon’s way of telling Rayna he knew he could be the man she needed him to be.
Despite the exit of the central character, Esten still reckons Nashville had plenty to explore. Since season one it has confronted alcohol and drug addiction, divorce, cancer, mental health and LGBTQ issues.
Esten admits that although it was just a storyline for him, these issues also reflected people’s lives and fans have approached him to thank him for the healing they felt from the show.
‘‘We have always dealt with these tough issues from the beginning and it seems to me like we are now dealing with one of the very toughest which is when you lose a spouse,’’ says Esten. ‘‘The question you ask is ‘is there life after this... can we go on?’.’’
The second half of season five will explore the element of life after death for Deacon and the rest of the Nashville family.
Although Rayna was a fictional character, Esten admitted it didn’t make losing her any less difficult.
‘‘You can, in some ways, mourn a fictional character and that grief has all the stages of real authentic grief,’’ explains Esten.
Esten says he had gone through the same stages of grief as an actual death – anger, denial and acceptance and imagined fans had felt the same.
However, in both real-life grief and on the show, there were two things people could always hold on to – love and music.
‘‘The power of music is not just a cliche, it is real. There are songs that lift us on our best day like our wedding day and help to make that day even more special.
‘‘Then there are songs that are there for us on our very, very worst days and somehow they help us to process that pain.’’ ● Nashville season five episodes, every Monday on Neon.