Dennis Quaid, who left Los Angeles for Nashville in 2020 with his wife Lauren Savoie and has spent the half-decade since as one of country music’s more visible Tennessee transplants, told Fox News Digital this week that the city he called home for more than four decades has “gone downhill,” framing his exit as part of a broader Hollywood-to-South migration he characterized as “thousands” of people leaving.
“It used to be such a great town and the ’90s was nice,” Quaid, 72, said in the interview, recorded at Nashville’s CMA Fest. “And then it’s been kind of going downhill, and I feel like people pay these taxes for no services.” The actor pointed in particular to fire response, an issue he said hit close to his Brentwood property, which had to be evacuated during the January 2025 Palisades-and-Eaton fire chain that reshaped Los Angeles’s residential map.
Fox News Digital, which ran the conversation Friday afternoon, reported Quaid was on the festival’s main vendor row when the interview was recorded. He has been a CMA Fest fixture since his 2018 musical pivot, and his Nashville-cut country band, Dennis Quaid & The Sharks, has held a recurring residency at the Grand Ole Opry over the past year. Allen’s Us Weekly remarks about the stalled Home Improvement reboot, which we covered in our earlier dispatch, were posted the same morning Quaid’s Fox interview ran.
Quaid’s relocation is part of a five-year-and-counting pattern of high-profile Hollywood-to-Nashville moves. Reese Witherspoon, who keeps Hello Sunshine production base in Los Angeles, established her actual residence in Tennessee in 2019. Justin Timberlake, who is from Memphis, has split his time between Manhattan and Nashville since 2020. Faith Hill and Tim McGraw have lived in the broader Nashville area since 1996. The post-pandemic wave Quaid referenced includes Cuba Gooding Jr., Aaron Lewis and Kid Rock, each of whom has discussed the Tennessee move publicly.
Los Angeles, by the city controller’s own numbers, lost roughly 110,000 net residents between 2020 and 2024, with the bulk going to Texas, Tennessee and Florida. The post-2025-fires demographic data has not yet been fully tabulated, but city budget projections released in May indicate the city expects continued out-migration through 2027. Quaid’s comments are likely to be cited in subsequent Hollywood-exit reporting, the same way the 2022 Joe Rogan-to-Austin move set the template for the podcast-host relocation cycle.
The actor was promoting his Reagan biopic follow-up, the Bill Belichick-documentary-adjacent The Coaching Tree, currently in post-production for a Q4 2026 theatrical release. He is also attached to Showtime’s The Wonder Decade limited series, a Yellowstone-spinoff-adjacent project he is producing in partnership with the Taylor Sheridan team. His Quaid & The Sharks band has a fall touring leg through the Southeast and a Grand Ole Opry residency planned for September.
The CMA Fest itself, which closed Sunday in downtown Nashville, was the country music industry’s largest fan-and-press gathering of the year. WSM Nashville morning host Bill Cody, who died Tuesday at 67, was honored with a Saturday-night moment of silence on the main stage; our coverage of his death is available here. Billboard’s Black Women in Music dinner in Los Angeles Thursday, where Chaka Khan and Kelly Rowland were honored, sat as the West Coast counter-program; our Friday-night dispatch is also available.
Quaid has not publicly addressed his Brentwood property’s post-fire status, but his Fox News conversation made it clear that Los Angeles remains an active part of his professional calendar. He has continued to film studio work in the city and has retained his agent at WME’s Beverly Hills office. The Nashville residence is where he records, writes and increasingly does press, but he has not publicly committed to selling the Los Angeles home.
