Charles Esten jumps ‘bodily’ into country music
On a recent Saturday NASHVILLE night, Charles Esten grabbed his guitar — the acoustic one with the leather strap embossed “Deacon” near the shoulder in honor of the role he plays on TV’s Nashville (CMT, Thursdays, 9 p.m. ET/PT) — and prepared to play the Grand Ole Opry.
“It’s like I’ve found Narnia,” he says in his dressing room, referring to the fantasy world created by C.S. Lewis. “I’m going to be walking out, standing on that wood, playing a song that I wrote and one that Deacon sang. I know I’m not fully absorbing any of this.”
The performance will be the 71st time Esten has played the Opry since he moved to Nashville five years ago to star as Deacon Claybourne. It’s also a celebration for Esten — country music’s unexpected marathon man, who launched his Every Single Friday campaign a little more than a year ago. Esten self-released an original single every week for 54 weeks during the run — an unequaled commercial feat in the genre. Esten plans to compile the singles into six nine-song EPs.
“Music predates his career as an actor,” says Nashville show originator and executive producer Steve Buchanan. “Chip very quickly engaged in the songwriting community in Nashville. … He’s just an incredibly prolific guy to start with. When he decided to start releasing music on Fridays, it was like opening the floodgates.”
The first music Esten remembers hearing as a child is The Beatles, and he and his friends cut a guitar shape out of a piece of wood, nailed a 2-by-4 to it for a neck and pretended to sing along. When he was in the seventh grade, his family purchased a country music anthology including songs and narration. He still remembers Minnie Pearl sharing heartbreaking memories of Hank Williams. They were singing I
Saw the Light in the car when
Williams stopped Pearl and told her, “That’s the trouble, Minnie, there ain’t no light.”
“Listening to this was like, ‘Wow,’ ” Esten recalls. “When I got to stand on that Opry stage, it was mythical.”
Despite his William & Mary college degree in economics, he says he really majored in his band. It was chatting with the audience between songs that Esten now realizes was the roots of his improvisational comedy that led him to California after graduation and an eventual spot on the show Whose Line Is It Anyway?
He and wife Patty Puskar built their family in California and she says he routinely turned down job offers that would take him away from her and their children. But when she read the script for
Nashville, she knew it was time. “I put it down and was like, ‘This one is worth it,’ ” she says.
When Esten hatched his plan for Every Single Friday, he found pleasure in the creative control that he lacked on set.
“I’m an actor, which means that other people tell me what to say,” Esten says. “There’s something deeply satisfying that every part of this was my call.”
Better than anyone, Esten knows he got into country music through a “strange side-door.” In his mind, he had two choices: He could deny himself the chance, or he could dive in and do his best even though he isn’t sure he’s earned it.
“Music is this water that I missed for so long, and this is just me jumping in, bodily, all the way,” he says.