Muscadine Bloodline Calls Out Music Row With New Single “Dispatch To 16th Ave”

Shots fired.

Muscadine Bloodline released the title track to their upcoming album, “Dispatch to 16th Ave” – and they didn’t hold anything back on this one.

Reminiscent of George Strait and Alan Jackson’s “Murder on Music Row,” the song is a dispatcher’s “man down” call to 16th Avenue – the home of Nashville’s historic Music Row. The victim is a 19-year old trying to make it in country music. And the suspect? A “record man hellbent on changing his sound.”

“Another murder on Music Row
Another ‘Never woulda made it on the radio’
Another couldn’t catch a flame ’cause he played too slow
Wouldn’t sing something that somebody else wrote

Shoulda packed up and headed on home
With his pen and pad filled with country songs
Wound up found on the side of town
Where the twang used to hang around
Dispatch to 16th Ave
I’m afraid there’s another man down”

Written by the guys of Muscadine Bloodline themselves, the entire song is a stinging rebuke of the commercialism of a music industry that’s become more about the money than the music, one that “used to be about honest song but the dollar sign took its place.”

“Being in Nashville for seven years, we’ve seen our fair share of artists who have given up their creativity for the sake of ‘making it.’ 

The song starts and it might make you think of first responders arriving at a murder scene. Instead of losing a life, it’s about all the young, aspiring musicians losing themselves in what music was never supposed to be.

We thought of all the men and women that move to Nashville to chase a dream and hope to inspire all young artists to dare to be different.”

This is a song that would have never seen the light of day if Muscadine Bloodline weren’t independent artists who are able to control their own music because they’re not signed to a label.

You think a record label’s going to let somebody (not named George Strait or Alan Jackson) call them out like this? Hell no.

But let me tell you: I’m 100% here for it.

Muscadine Bloodline also stopped by the Whiskey Riff Raff podcast recently (our first three time guest) to talk about making it in the music business as independent artists.

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