Elijah Shaw came to Nashville in the 1990s to study music. At first, that meant spending a lot of time on the road. "The first decade of my career, [I was] traveling all over the place and interacting with major record labels and sort of going where ever work would take me," he says. Eventually, Shaw built The Toy Box, a soundproofed home studio located in his detached garage. Being able to work at home, he says, allowed him the opportunity to raise his daughter while still tapping into one of the world's best music scenes, bringing stability to an unpredictable business. "Nashville is one of the few places remaining in the world where some of the very best musicians get together face to face to make music," says Shaw, who has worked with recording artists ranging from Jack White to Wilco to Adele. "That's why I wanted to be here and why I wanted to create a home studio." But for the last four years, the city of Nashville has been trying to shut that studio down. In August 2015, Shaw received a letter from the Department of Codes and Building Inspection informing him that his studio was an unpermitted home business and was therefore illegal. Shaw was given two weeks to cease and desist his recording operations or else face daily fines of $50 and potentially be taken to court. "My heart just dropped completely," Shaw says. "For the next week I couldn't even sleep, like what am I going to do? This is my entire life, this is my everything." After the letter came a phone call from a code enforcement officer, followed by a home inspection, and then a mounting series of demands from officials. Shaw was told to remove recording equipment from his house, strip his prices and address off his business' website, and take videos of his studio recordings off his YouTube channel. Failure to comply would mean fines and possibly even jail time...MORE
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