Kathie Lee Gifford moving to Nashville after she leaves 'Today'

Kathie Lee Gifford is moving to Music City!

The television veteran revealed to People that following her last day on the "Today" show, Friday, April 5, after 11 years, she plans on packing up her current home outside of New York City in Greenwich, Connecticut, and moving to Nashville, Tennessee, where she has already purchases a house.

"The work that I want to do isn't here anymore," she explained. "I am an artist, I'm an actress, I'm a writer, I'm a songwriter, a director now. That's the stuff that feeds my soul and I know that I'm running out of time to do those things."

SEE ALSO: Inside Kathie Lee Gifford's star-studded going away party

Gifford has long expressed that she intends to focus on writing and producing Christian movies and music going forward, which is where her passions lie. She told People that she envisions the lifestyle of Nashville to be one that she will quickly get acclimated to.

"Even if you're just having a dinner party there, invariably people end up at your patio or taking your guitar off the wall, and next thing you know, you've written a song and you're in the studio the next week doing a demo," she said.

Another factor pushing her out of the New York tri-state area is a feeling of sadness hanging over her life without her husband, Frank, who died in 2015, her mother, Joan, who died in 2017, and her children, Cody, 29, and Cassidy, 26, both living across the country in Los Angeles.

"I experienced huge changes," Gifford said. "I've become a widow, an orphan and an empty-nester all at once. There's nothing really keeping me in this part of the country anymore except for my job."

SEE ALSO: Kathie Lee Gifford thinks Matt Lauer deserves a second chance

"In our family, we always did something called, 'sunset alert,'" Gifford went on. "We always lived in places where the sunsets were spectacular. And no matter what, we would have to drop whatever we were doing and go and honor the sunset because God made it. And, for me, the hardest part of my day became sunsets when it would just be me and I'd go, 'sunset alert' by myself. It made me realize, I don't want to stop being joyful. I'm going to go share my sunset somewhere."

On Wednesday, a little over a week before her last day on "Today," Gifford and her NBC family celebrated her decade-plus of work at the network with a star-studded going away party.

See photos from Kathie Lee Gifford's going away party below: