Nashville season 1 episode 2

Nashville Recap: I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love With You)

 

Nashville season 1 episode 2

I think I’ll start off each Nashville recap with the song to download from that particular episode. In the pilot episode, I noted that “If I Didn’t Know Better,” sung by Clare Bowen (Scarlett) and Sam Palladio (Gunnar), was the song I’d be downloading.  I did, and I think I’ve listened to it every day so far. It even made it to No. 5 on iTunes country chart the week it was released, and Entertainment Weekly gave it some awesome praise in its October 26 issue.

In the current episode, the song to download is the Rayna-Deacon duet “No One Could Ever Love You (Quite Like I Do)” sung by Connie Britton and Charles Esten, even though they actually released Juliette Barnes’ (Hayden Panettiere) “Telescope” for radio play.

This episode starts off with Rayna being a regular mom, driving her regular kids to a regular school when she finds herself stuck in a special kind of traffic. The traffic is due to the filming of Juliette Barnes’ new music video “Telescope.” This is a gratuitous opportunity for wardrobe to put Hayden Panettiere in a bustier and short shorts and have her gallivanting around and draping herself across things like tree limbs.

On the other side of town, Rayna’s dad, Lamar (Powers Boothe), launches an investigation into Teddy’s past to make sure there are no skeletons in the closet before he dumps a ridiculous amount of money into Teddy’s political campaign.  Unfortunately, there are a few bones in the closet in Teddy’s failed ventures as we see Mr. Rayna James try to rid himself of the paper trail.

Meanwhile, Scarlett’s boyfriend, Avery (Jonathan Jackson) continues to live the life of a struggling musician, while Scarlett has seemingly effortlessly caught Watty’s (JD Souther) ear and contemplates taking him up on his offer to record a demo reel with Gunnar. Scarlett doesn’t want to record the demo because she thinks it’ll upset Avery, but without her, there will be no demo.

As Lamar’s team investigates and unearths Rayna and Teddy’s past, it’s revealed (as if we didn’t already gather) that Rayna and Deacon were once madly in love back in their own struggling musician days. Though the pair hit a rocky patch when Deacon started to dip into alcohol and drugs and eventually headed to Splitsville as a couple once Deacon entered rehab and Rayna turned to Teddy for comfort and solace. So now we know Teddy was the rebound man, and I suspect he knows it, too.

Juliette continues to make her play to get Deacon to work with her, even going so far as to buy him a $50K vintage guitar. He takes the gift, but with a lot of reservation. She seduces him — again.

After dealing with Juliette much longer, I imagine Deacon will be facing his old demons that sent him to rehab in the first place. We find Deacon at the Bluebird where he shows up from time to time to sing a few tunes. On this particular night, both Juliette and Rayna are in the crowd, and when Deacon tells the audience he has a special guest he wants to bring up to the stage to sing with him, Juliette automatically thinks its her and starts to rise. But when Deacon calls out Rayna’s name, she sinks slowly back down.

He and Rayna sing “No One Could Ever Love You” — a song they sang when they were first starting out as musicians and in love with each other. The song brings a flood of memories and emotions back to Rayna, and she runs home to Teddy to seek solace back in his arms as a way to ignore her feelings for Deacon that she has tamped down so very long ago.

After seeing the chemistry between Rayna and Deacon during their duet and with some prompting from Watty that Scarlett and Gunnar could be Rayna and Deacon in the future, Scarlett relents and agrees to do the demo.

As I said in my previous post, I’m not a fan of country music per se, so I was reluctant to even watch this show originally, but I am enjoying it much more than I thought I would. While I’m still not a fan of the genre, there always seems to be one song that totally bends my ear and I have to hit “rewind” to listen to it again.


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One response to “Nashville Recap: I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love With You)”

  1. canaan015 Avatar
    canaan015

    This episode was full of interesting twists, between the uncanny chemistry between Rayna and Deacon and the investigation on Teddy’s past. It must have been a slap in the face for Rayna, running into traffic that was caused by Juliette’s music video shoot. I’m with you, I’m not the biggest fan of country, but this show has had several note-worthy hits that I happened to like.

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