In 1998, roughly 2 million visitors came to see what there was to see in Nashville. By 2018, that number had ballooned to 15.2 million.

In that span of two decades, the boundaries of Nashville did not change. But something did. Or rather, many somethings changed, and kept changing, until many who lived here began to feel they no longer recognized their own city. And some began to feel it wasn't their own city at all anymore, pushed to its fringes by rising housing costs. Between 1998 and 2018, the population of Nashville grew by 150,000. On some level, Nashville has always packaged itself for consumption, but something clicked and suddenly everyone wanted a taste.

But why Nashville? Why now? What changed to make all this change possible? This book is an attempt to understand those changes, or, if not to understand them, exactly, then to grapple with the question: What happened?