Creativity Quote by Crystal Gayle

There’s a quiet sting in Crystal Gayle’s “It used to be…” a phrase that doesn’t just mourn the past, it indicts the present. As a veteran of Nashville’s older studio-and-songwriter ecosystem, she’s pointing at a specific kind of cultural infrastructure: labels willing to invest time, money, and patience in artists who hadn’t yet become a sure bet. The intent isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake; it’s a complaint about risk. About who gets nurtured and who gets left to fend for themselves.

The subtext is economic, not romantic. “Develop” is industry code for long timelines, multiple singles, tour support, coaching, and the freedom to be uneven while becoming distinctive. Gayle is implicitly contrasting that with today’s pipeline, where an artist’s “promise” is often measured by streaming data, TikTok traction, and a pre-built audience. Nashville still claims to be a town of songs and craft, but she’s suggesting it increasingly behaves like any other content hub: scale what’s already working, minimize the rest.

Context matters because Gayle’s era was built on relationship capitalism - producers, radio, and labels operating as gatekeepers who could also be patrons. That system was never pure (it excluded plenty of voices), but it could produce slow-burn careers. Her line lands because it captures a shift from cultivation to extraction: artists expected to arrive fully formed, market-tested, and monetizable. Underneath the wistfulness is a warning to the city’s self-image: if Nashville stops making artists, it becomes a place that merely processes them.