Round Top Film Festival adds a Bluebird Cafe songwriter round for 2026

The Round Top Film Festival, held in the Texas town of the same name, is putting music on its programme for the first time. The 2026 edition adds a strand built with the Bluebird Cafe and Vinyll Studios, and the centrepiece is a screening followed by a performance rather than a concert bolted onto a film week.

On 14 November the festival will show an episode of SONGWRITER, a documentary series created and produced by Vinyll Studios, which in this instance follows Shane McAnally. The episode takes its name from Merry Go Round and tracks him from Mineral Wells, Texas through the years he spent trying to make it as an artist and into the career as one of country music's most successful writers that he eventually built instead.

Immediately afterwards McAnally sits down with Josh Osborne and a third writer, still to be announced, for a songwriter round of the kind the Bluebird made famous: writers in a circle, playing their own songs and explaining where each one came from.

McAnally made the geography the point in his own remarks. "I grew up a few hours up the road from Round Top," he said, adding that he spent his twenties trying to get out of small-town Texas and has been writing about it ever since. Bringing the film back to that part of the state and then playing the songs that came out of it with Osborne is, in his phrasing, about as full circle as it gets.

The Bluebird's involvement is personal rather than corporate. Erika Wollam-Nichols, the listening room's general manager and chief operating officer, said the venue has known McAnally "since he first came to Nashville and played on our Open Mic," and framed the partnership as joining a festival already committed to storytelling.

Liz Rose, the songwriter who is vice chairman of Vinyll Studios, described the series as an attempt to connect audiences with the people and experiences behind songs they already know, and said pairing the film with a Bluebird round moves the story from screen to stage.

The programme does something the Nashville trades rarely see from a film festival, which is to treat songwriting as the subject rather than the soundtrack. Writers usually surface in the country press through the chart, as Matt Dragstrem did this week and as John Byron did earlier in the summer; putting one on a cinema screen in his home state is a different order of attention. The November dates will be logged with the rest of the festival tracker.