How Charles Esten Turned Acting in 'Nashville' into a Career in Country Music
Charles Esten
It’s been more than 10 years in the making, but Charles Esten, the Nashville star, 58, is releasing his debut album, Love Ain’t Pretty (on sale Jan. 26), which began taking shape when he first arrived in Music City to take on the role of Deacon Claybourne. Esten, who cowrote all 14 songs with some of Nashville’s best songwriters, has released several singles since that time, but this is his first compilation of songs that explores life, love and the passing of time through the lens of a traveled and tested everyman.
Parade sat down with Esten to discuss his time on Nashville, his time in Nashville and his latest album.
Walter Scott: Your album has an interesting title, Love Ain’t Pretty. Is that the theme?
Charles Esten: It really touches on a theme of the album because love ain’t pretty. When you are little, love is pretty. It’s the little candy hearts, the valentines you give to somebody, but as you get older you realize that when you love, you leave yourself open to so much. You leave yourself vulnerable to pain, to loss, to the gamut of emotions you can feel, and it can be devastating.
And so, the song lists all those things, but it doesn’t stop there, it says, “Love ain’t pretty, but damn, it’s beautiful.” So, for a while, you think it’s somebody who’s against love. On the contrary; it’s beautiful, it’s deeper, it’s richer than pretty, but you’ve got to give it respect and you’ve got to be ready for anything. That serves very well as the title track for the album because the album explores the human heart and the pain that it can go through, and the loss of hope that it can experience, and hopefully is a journey back to the hope and the light that love can bring.
You co-authored all of the songs on the album, so are they all really personal or are some just fun songs?
Definitely, some of them are fun songs. As an actor, as I got older, what I understood is that what you really want in a role is not who has the most lines, but to me, it’s who has the most facets? Who is the most human? And that’s what playing the character of Deacon Claybourne was like; you got to be all these things. I got to be terribly sad sometimes and face the different problems life brings, like addictions or health issues, but then sometimes Deacon was just flat out funny and silly.
So, it would not be me if I left any aspect of that out [of my album]. I’m also the guy that was on Whose Line Is It Anyway? and I was on The Office, so that kind of humor is part of me, so there was no way I could leave it off the album.
Is there one song on the album that defines who you are now, that represents you the most?
It’s tricky because, at any given moment, you’re the person on your knees that needs more faith, hope and light, and the next time you’re dancing, you’re being funny. If I had to choose one, I would say it’s near the end of the album as we get to “Maybe I’m Alright” and “Down the Road.” These are two songs that have optimism in them.
Right now, I’ll say “Maybe I’m Alright.” This is a song for anyone that has been going through it, and in the end that means all of us. It just sort of embraces the battle, it says, “Maybe I’m alright, maybe just a little crazy suits me fine. It just occurred to me, came on like a light, maybe I’m alright.” And so, if anybody could walk away from the album going, “Well, I’m going through a lot, but maybe I’m alright,” then that would be fine with me.
Charles Esten
This was 10 years in the making, why so long? Somewhere along the way you could have released other songs, why did you wait for this moment?
Well, I did not wait for singles, I have put out more than my fair share of singles. You’ve got to remember that I came here later in life. I was 46 when I started on Nashville. And so, this place to me was the Promised Land, the land I had dreamt of, quite literally. It’s almost out of The Wizard of Oz; it’s called Music City like Emerald City, so this was my dream place.
I had written songs my whole life but once I arrived here, I was now writing with the greatest writers in the world. They were recording my songs, great producers were producing them, so I put out all these singles. In fact, I put out a world record number of singles back in 2016. That was just me diving in, not wanting to leave anything undone. Because with a TV show, I didn’t know how long I had here, so I was making the most of it. But then when it ended, we said, “Well, I guess we’re staying.”
For a long time now, I’ve been thinking about the album, what would the album be? Some of it is I just take a long time on things I care the most about. There’s a little bit of a paralysis of analysis, but in the end, I don’t regret a moment of that analysis, or a moment of that waiting because it meant that I was more fully formed as an artist, and this album is so much more fully formed as a concept and as a piece of work. It took me a while but in the end I’m glad that it did.
When Nashville ended, why did you decide to stay in Nashville?
When you reach the promised land, why leave? There’s a John Denver song [“Rocky Mountain High”] that says coming home to a place he’d never been before, and that is what this place felt like instantly. Nashville felt like a home, but one that I’d never been to before, and I was made to feel welcome immediately. And although we always loved being in L.A., we raised our family there, so I never, ever bad-talk L.A., but just getting here, it felt like the puzzle piece clicked and fit.
And not to mention the fact that we’re in a new world with acting where you don’t have to be in L.A. Honestly, when I came here to do Nashville, we were still in a world where most auditions were in person. But by the time I was done with Nashville and certainly by the time COVID lockdowns had finished, we’re in a place now where you can live next door to the studio and they’re still going to want to see you on tape. You can be an actor from anywhere these days and so why not do it in the place that I love so much?
Related: Charles Esten on the Beginning of the End for Nashville and What's Next
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Nashville did a lot for you, and one of those things was performing for the first time at the Grand Ole Opry. Do you remember your first time?
Oh, absolutely. Saturday, Nov. 10, 2012, that was my Opry debut with Jimmy Dickens, who by that time was 93 years old and had performed with Hank Williams. I was raised by a father that didn’t just play country music but schooled me in the Grand Ole Opry and the importance of that place.
I should tell you one thing. In that first set, I knew why I was there, I knew I was there because I was Deacon Claybourne. I had paid my dues in other ways to get there but I was not one of those folks who’d been trying to get on the Opry for so long. So, I thought it was only fitting that I should play a Buck Owens song that later Ringo Starr covered for The Beatles called “Act Naturally.” And, of course, that verse is, “They’re going to put me in the movies, they’re going to make a big star out of me. They’re going to play a show about a man that’s sad and lonely, and all I gotta do is act naturally.”
That was the first one. The fact that I’ve now had over 165 performances on the Grand Ole Opry, it’s one of the greatest blessings in my life to ever stand on that stage, let alone to do it that many times. All I have is enormous gratitude for the people at the Opry for letting this boy get up on that stage.
You actually began your career playing Buddy Holly, so you started with music and acting combined?
When I was a kid, I was always singing and writing songs. In college, I was in a band for five years. Honestly, if those guys had all decided they wanted to play music, I would have stayed in a band and I would have probably done music with them. But they all went on to be, as the song says, doctors and lawyers and stuff, so I said, “Well, what am I going to do?” I had some friends out in L.A. that were making it in the acting business, so I thought I'd go visit out there.
And it all happened rather quickly, but really the first job I had was, maybe not ironically, maybe providentially, was me holding an electric guitar and singing the songs of Buddy Holly on the stage on the West End, and doing the acting as well. So, you’re right, they always felt like bookends to me. Buddy was my first job where I got to use what I knew—music—to support and to learn what I was hoping to learn, which was acting.
And then all these years in between, like 20 years in between, and then I get this other perfect combination of Nashville with Deacon Claybourne, where now all the acting I’d done all these years and all the music I’d done all these years came together and meant that I got to do both. And once I had the ability and the option to do both, I knew for a fact I was never going to let go of that. This is me to the very end.
More recently, you were on Outer Banks, and your character Ward dies at the end of Season 3. How would you compare playing him with Deacon?
Ward was a true gift, an absolute gift out of nowhere. I was sitting at this desk, and it had been maybe a little bit over a year since Nashville. I’ve been a part of this business a long time, so I know it’s very, very unusual not only to get one iconic role like Deacon was, but it’s very, very rare to get another character that’s that deep and rich. And if you do, nine times out of 10, they’re going to try to make it some version of what you’ve already done, like “Deacon light.”
So, I was so thrilled to get a phone call from Josh and Jonas Pate and Shannon Burke, those are the creators of Outer Banks. I had worked with Jonas before, and he remembered me from a role I did years ago on a show called Dragnet that Ed O’Neill starred in. And he had seen Nashville and he told me he had this character, this father, that starts off and you think he’s such a good guy and just a normal father. He knew that Deacon would give the good head fake on that, like everybody would go, “Oh, here comes Deacon light,” and then he said, “But trust me when I tell you, this character’s going a different direction.” So, I didn’t end up playing another version of Deacon, I ended up playing this guy Ward Cameron. Ward was very, very multifaceted; he wasn’t just a mustache-twirling evil guy. I hope you could see the pain that he felt as he did these things and he just kept having to double down on his bad choices to cover up for the other ones. He was trying to protect his family, but he was also trying to protect himself.
So, he goes down these dark routes and throughout the show Sarah (Madelyn Cline) keeps asking, “What happened to you? Who have you become? You forget I know who you are.” Sarah always knew the good father that was at the heart of it all, that had just gone so desperately wrong. So, there at the end, once again, spoiler alert for anybody who’s a little slow on the watching, but there at the end, I was so grateful that Ward—I knew the character was going to be dying from the very beginning—he had always said he would do anything for Sarah, and for a while there, it didn’t look like that was the case at all.
Your daughter had leukemia when she was younger, and you became a spokesperson for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. What is your involvement with that now?
We absolutely have stuck with it, we are part of a group called “Team Addie,” my wife Patty and I run Team Addie. Team Addie is a group within the Light the Night campaign, which is the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s largest annual campaign. We just crossed the $2 million dollar mark of our involvement, our 10 years here in Nashville. As soon as I got here, it was at the Grand Ole Opry, my friend Pete told me how we could get involved here.
I have to tell you, my daughter, she was diagnosed when she was 2.5 and the doctors said to me, “And here’s what we’re going to do.” I’ll never forget that phrase, because instantly I knew that phrase didn’t just happen, because when I was a kid…when we were kids that was a death sentence. So, the fact that the doctor had options and cures was because of years of research, and that research was because of years of fundraising. I talked about my debt to Nashville, my debt to those that went ahead and raised money to fight blood cancer and did the research for it; I will never be able to repay that debt.
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So, we’re just doing all we can to pay it forward to somebody else who’s going through it right now. The battle of our lifetime is against blood cancer. Meanwhile, our daughter’s battle is behind her. She was 2.5 when she was diagnosed, she just graduated not too long ago after playing five years of division 1 soccer with a master’s in business, and she started working up in Northern Virginia, in my old stomping grounds, my hometown. And every moment, every single thing that happens to her, it just glistens and glows to us as a blessing because it wasn’t assured to us. So, that’s the work we do to say thank you, and the thank you will never end.
What’s next for you? What is 2024 looking like? Are you going to be on tour? Are you looking for another series?
I’m absolutely going to be on tour. I know that because they just announced the U.K. and European leg of our Love Ain’t Pretty tour. Every week, my wife and I have this thing called the Love Ain’t Pretty livestream that we do on Facebook Live. I’m on camera and I play some songs and I’ll tell stories. At week 20, the album drops. And what we’re finding is that people are joining in this livestream, and I’m talking, and I’ve got that guitar in my hand, and the keyboards, and we play the songs and we tell the stories.
Recently, I got off a three-day run in the Northeast, I was in Rochester, and I was in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and down in my hometown of Alexandria, and more and more people keep coming up to me and they say, “We watch the livestream every week,” so that’s the new world we’re in. I’m going out to meet people that already know us, and the fun part for me is they’re coming up to Patty and going, “You’re Patty!” They’ve seen her on the livestream. So, she and I are going to hit the road and play these songs, and hopefully all the people that have watched me on Nashville or Whose Line or Outer Banks, but definitely all the people that watch us on the livestream, we hope they come on out and hear these songs live.
