Nada Taha Looks Beyond Nashville, Building A Bridge For Country Music In London [Interview]

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Nada Taha. Photo: Johnnie Izquierdo

For nearly a decade, Nada Taha has been building a bridge between Nashville and London.

What began with a solo Christmas trip to the U.K. in 2016 grew into a career connecting country artists and audiences across the Atlantic. Through radio, Apple Music, live events and creative direction, Taha has worked to expand the voices represented within country music while helping Nashville recognize the growing international audience for the genre.

Now, she’s taking that work to London permanently.

Photo: Mike Weinberg

Taha describes herself as a “cultural curator,” a role that brings together the different parts of a career that began in journalism before moving into radio and creative direction. Each discipline has given her another way to approach storytelling and create opportunities for voices that might otherwise be overlooked.

“I curate in a way that helps expand voices that normally wouldn’t or sometimes don’t get to tell the stories that they want to tell,” Taha tells MusicRow.

Her interest in the U.K. country market began during that 2016 trip. At the time, Taha was working on the Bobby Bones Show and had limited time off. What she found in London was a country music audience already deeply invested in the genre.

The difference was that the audience wasn’t necessarily being served the music in the same way it was in the U.S.

“The audience in the U.K. doesn’t need to be convinced that they like country music. They like country music. It just needs to be served and programmed for them.”

Photo: Courtesy of Taha

Taha saw fans singing along to deep cuts at shows from artists including Kip Moore, Little Big Town and Dan + Shay. The experience convinced her there was a larger opportunity to connect Nashville artists with an audience that was already hungry for country music. 

That opportunity grew through her work with Apple Music. Taha helped push the platform to establish a stronger presence in the U.K., including bringing Apple Music to C2C: Country to Country for the first time.

At C2C, she curated the festival’s Saloon stage, handling interviews, advancing the programming and producing the stage herself. Rather than simply presenting performances, she wanted the intimate setting to feel more like a Nashville writer’s round, giving fans the opportunity to hear artists explain their songs and careers.

The lineup included Jillian Jacqueline, Tigerlily Gold, Nate Smith, Willie Jones and Remember Monday.

Photo: Nina Marshall

“I think a lot of fans are craving authenticity. And that is at the core, what country music is. Authentic storytelling.” 

It marked the first time Apple Music had taken an official presence at C2C, giving the platform’s UK country music audience a live counterpart to its digital programming , and giving Taha a stage to put her curatorial philosophy into practice in front of a London crowd.

That philosophy also informed Taha’s Apple Music programming. She intentionally used opportunities to highlight marginalized artists, including women, Black artists and LGBTQ+ artists. Over four years, three daily picks added up to something more than a radio playlist, a sustained editorial statement about whose voices deserved to be heard in a genre that has historically struggled with representation. 

For Taha, the work was personal. As an Egyptian-American woman who has spent 15 years in Nashville, she understood what it meant to work inside a genre that historically wasn’t built with someone like her in mind.

Photo: Nina Marshall

That same approach led to one of her proudest career accomplishments: the Cross Country exhibition at the National Museum of African American Music. As the creative force behind the project, Taha commissioned 14 artists of color to create original works inspired by Breland’s music, using mediums including photography, painting, video and fashion.

She oversaw the exhibition from concept to execution, including authoring, conceiving, commissioning, designing, building, and producing the entire exhibition from nothing.

The project allowed Taha to tell a Black country artist’s story through the perspectives of other artists of color, creating a space for voices that might not traditionally have had a place within the country music conversation. The resulting exhibition was one of the few times country music had been interpreted through the visual arts by a cohort of artists of color, positioning the genre within a broader cultural conversation it rarely enters.

While the exhibition remains a career highlight, Taha was disappointed by the lack of attention it received. That experience contributed to a broader realization about her work in Nashville, progress is happening, but there is still a significant gap between moments of representation and sustained change.

Photo: Courtesy of Taha

That realization has helped shape her decision to move to London.

Taha sees the U.K. as a market with an enormous appetite for country music but an infrastructure that has yet to catch up with that demand. She believes that gap creates an opportunity to expand not only the genre’s international reach, but also the range of artists and stories being represented.

“Country music’s cultural and commercial future depends on expanding whose stories are told and whose voices tell those stories.”

Her next chapter will also include Hear Me Out!, an original street-based music video countdown show she launched in Nashville. Inspired by TRL, the series brings music videos back into the spotlight while intentionally crossing genre lines.

Taha plans to continue Hear Me Out! in London, using the city as another place to explore what audiences are listening to and introduce people to music outside their usual lanes.

Ultimately, her move isn’t about leaving Nashville behind. It’s about extending the work she’s already spent years doing.

“I feel like there is an opportunity to grow Nashville, to grow country music, to expand the art and the creativity and the stories that get told from this side of the Atlantic.” 

After years of working between Nashville and London, Taha is ready to build that bridge from the other side.

Madison Hahnen
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