David Nail

David Nail

David Nail is on his way to Stoney’s Rockin’ Country on Friday Night, July 8th, 2022

Doors are at 7pm and the show starts at 10pm!
This is an 18 and over event!

GA 21+ tickets are $15.00 in advance
18+ tickets are $25 in advance

David Nail’s candor cuts like a laser through star-making propriety, a ritual of predictable answers to predictable questions, recited by artists averse to the controversy that truth can bring.

True, he is respected up and down and beyond Music Row. He’s written or co-written multiple hits. Critics laud his singing too: The late, revered Chuck Dauphin, for one, marveled at Nail’s ability to turn an “ordinary lyric and arrangement” into a “tour de force,” adding, “simply put … he is not one of us.”

So he’s got rock-solid credentials. And he earned them despite a refusal to present himself in a false light. His songs pull no punches in evoking the demons with which he has wrestled through much of his life. As Nail explains, it’s not so much an act of courage to write about depression and its effects. Rather, it is simply who he is; he says, in conversation and through music, what he must say.

In Nail’s own words, “My philosophy has always been, I just hope to have a good enough year that I can have a next year while staying as true to myself as I possibly can.”

The practical and the personal: These are the poles that mark the path Nail continues to follow. It began in Kennett, Missouri, Nail’s hometown, and led to Nashville. At the time, he recalls, “I’d written songs about a lot of things I had not lived or experienced. So it was like I’d gotten onto this train and I had to just sit there and hope that the train kept moving. I was so young and naive and ignorant. I started trying to figure things out but I really needed somebody to tell me I wasn’t a moron. First and foremost, I credit Frank Liddell with helping me find where I should live musically. He’s always told me it’s alright to experiment.”

The celebrated producer helmed Nail’s album debut, I’m About To Come Alive, and the three that followed: The Sound Of A Million Dreams, I’m A Fire and Fighter. These releases ignited his reputation as an innovator and creative risk-taker yet left Nail feeling restless. His bouts with what he freely describes as “mental illness,” exacerbated by having to chafe against commercial pressures, hastened his departure from MCA Nashville, the only record company home he’d ever known, where he’d formed friendships that endure even now.