Editor’s Note: Earlier this month, we shared our exclusive Artist of the Month interview with Tenille Townes exploring the many factors and creative processes that brought about her excellent new album, The Acrobat.
That interview, with BGS contributor Alison Richter, included many more golden moments and special tidbits that ended up cut for length, so we’re excited to share portions of those edits here as a bonus follow-up to our feature conversation. Below, enjoy Townes’ insight, wisdom, and feelings about her songwriting methods, collaborating with Lori McKenna, trusting herself at the helm of her new album, and more.
And, continue exploring all of our Artist of the Month coverage of Tenille Townes – and our Essentials Playlist – right here, on Good Country and BGS.
Songwriting
I have a notes thing on my phone that I’m always picking at. I also have random voice notes in my phone from airplane windows. There’s something about the perspective of zooming out. I think about songs differently up there, so there’s plenty of voice memos of me singing into the window seat with the hum of the engine.
Songwriting is so interesting because it calls you to be present in the moment. When I’m more present, I notice songs around me anywhere. It’s the gift of paying attention. I push myself to keep working on that, striving to notice what’s happening around me and how I feel about it. That’s what inspires me to keep writing.
Working with Lori McKenna
I love Lori so much. Talk about somebody with lived experience, and also she has this way of completely disarming any sort of fear. Obviously she’s a legend. She’s a hero to me. She’s been that forever. When I first moved to Nashville, I saw her play a round at the Bluebird [Cafe] and I was like, “I want to write songs like that someday.” I dove into her whole catalog and learned so much from studying her work. There’s such vulnerability to her writing and there’s so much she isn’t afraid to say. She’s paved the way for so many writers. We’ve all learned from her.
I’ll never forget when we got to write for the first time. I was so nervous, but she made me feel at home and listened to and valued all the things. I had the best day. A lot of times people will say, “Be careful about meeting your heroes.” That could be the farthest thing from the truth about Lori. She’s over and beyond what you would expect. From that, we struck up a friendship and have gotten to write a ton of songs through the years.
She invited me to Boston and I got to spend a few days with her, writing in her music room. I loved every second of that trip. A lot of the songs on this record came from that time with the two of us together. She was always so encouraging about my work tapes. She was like, “You should really make a record of that someday.” So it’s full circle to me to have some of our songs together on this project.
It made sense to extend the invitation, in case she was up for singing on “the acrobat,” and she ever so graciously said yes. It was such a great experience getting to work on that with her. She starts singing as the fortune teller in the song. She enters around that line, which is such a timely entrance because she’s got this perspective of wisdom that comes from lived experience and from somebody who’s a complete master of the craft. I respect her so much, and I’m so glad to call her a friend.
I was maybe four or five songs in. Honestly, if I’d sat down at the beginning of it and gone, “I’m gonna produce a record,” I’m not sure I’d have ever started. I had so much fear and anxiety at that time – that plan never would have worked. But it’s like this record guided me along its way.
I got a few songs done and sent it to a producer friend I’ve worked with in the past. I was like, “This is something I’m excited about. Who should I get to mix this or would you want to maybe guide the rest?” He was like, “I don’t think you need anybody. You should see this through. This sounds wonderful. Just follow your gut and enjoy the ride.” That was so encouraging to hear in that pivotal moment. I kept going and I really enjoyed the process beyond that point.
I think I’m hardwired … in my family system and everything I was always the peacekeeper, and it’s in my nature to make sure everybody else is okay. It was really strengthening to not have to check on anybody else in this process and to trust my own compass again. I’m glad I gave myself permission to do that, but it was never the initial plan.
The Challenges of Self-Producing
Once I decided I was doing it, I had reached the part in my healing, my mental health journey, where I was starting to recognize that the imperfections of this project were actually where the magic was. I think the music guiding me [toward] that was a little bit of a spiritual letting go. That’s the practice.
One of the themes in this record is letting go. Even making it was a practice of that and going, “I could do that fifty more times and get it perfect, or I could accept that I think it sounds beautiful and human just like that,” and that’s what I did.
“she plays the piano”
This song is so special to me and it’s been a special one to me for years. I wrote it with Lori McKenna, Alex Stacey, and Amy Wadge over Zoom during the pandemic. I remember finishing it and going, “This song is so special. I don’t know when its moment is going to be,” because it wasn’t quite in the vibe of what I was releasing at that time. But I knew the song would tell me when it was time and I’m so glad the time is now.
The idea came from visiting my great-grandmother at her nursing home. She was there for close to 10 years and was on the Alzheimer’s and dementia ward. It was so tough, especially watching my grandmother. She went all the time, and watching her with her mom in that space was devastating. The fact that she didn’t recognize any of us or know where she was, that she was always time traveling, that was heartbreaking to have a front row seat to.
We went to visit and have lunch one day and there was this woman, this other patient, in the cafeteria. They had a keyboard, and at lunchtime she would sit and play this polka over and over. This sweet woman couldn’t tell us her name, she had no idea where she was, but she could play that polka like nobody’s business. She’d play the song and then glance around her shoulder and wait for us to clap. We’d cheer every time. It was like she played Carnegie Hall or something. We would applaud her and then she’d turn and face the piano and start the song over again.
I sat there, as a teenager, thinking how music can remember who we are even more than our mind can sometimes. That’s such a powerful thing. I’ll never forget witnessing that. I’ve wanted to write that song for a lot of years, so I’m glad it’s a part of this project. I think of that sweet woman and my great-grandmother every time I play it.
When Good Country spoke with award-winning singer-songwriter Tenille Townes in 2024, she had severed ties with Columbia Nashville and claimed her autonomy as a recording artist. It was a tremendous, liberating step into the unknown.
This month, Townes releases her first independent project, The Acrobat. Over the course of its 10 songs, she transparently and hauntingly channels the healing journey of the past two years – one that intertwined heartache, isolation, a plunge into depression, and the long road back.
She recorded The Acrobat at home, in the company of her beloved dog Sam, played all the instruments, and produced and mixed the tracks. This wasn’t the original plan, but as the work tapes progressed, she found catharsis in the honesty of the stripped-down vocals and guitar. This, she decided, was the album, and the best way to bring it to audiences was to perform it the way it was recorded.
She is now on The Living Room Tour, again with just her vocals and guitar, for intimate performances across the U.S. and her native Canada – with one exception: two dates with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra on April 23 and 25.
“I’m working with Dave Pierce, who’s arranging the shows,” she says. “He has written musical interludes between the songs that will accompany the storytelling pieces of what I’m doing and connect it all together. Hearing these songs in a completely different light has inspired me. Thinking about the magnitude of that many people onstage, it’s going to be emotional hearing that wall of sound all around me. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever done.”
You moved from Alberta to Nashville in 2013. Who were you then and who are you now? How has Nashville changed over 13 years and how has Nashville changed you?
Tenille Townes: I still feel that the spark for music, the love for it, the complete joy is intact, and I’m grateful for that. Nashville, as a community, has obviously grown so much and taken on lots of different lives in those 13 years, but the heart of the community feels the same to me.
What drew me to Nashville initially was the creative community, the writers, the songs that are created there every day, and this group of people that creatively have each other’s backs. I still love the heartbeat of that town so much. It’s a little harder to get in to see rounds at the Bluebird [Cafe] these days, or things like that, but the spirit’s the same.
When I first got to town, I was so wide-eyed and just [full of] complete optimism. I had this belief that anything’s possible, everything to prove and nothing to lose, and that tenacious… maybe naivete helped me kick down some doors and get things going.
A lot of the dreamer’s expectation is to show up in town, get the deal, and try to find a tribe of people who believe in what you’re doing. I had such an amazing experience finding wonderful people who believed in it with me, and we had a great run. But the deal is not the finish line. It’s where the whole new page of the dream begins, and I feel like a different person now experiencing the other side of that.
There were a lot of beautiful highs and a lot of hard parts in that journey and losing myself for a while. I feel this return to that same “everything to prove, nothing to lose” situation I started with 13 years ago. So it feels good to be getting back to that feisty energy.
How did the cumulative effect of those years and experiences bring you to this point professionally and personally?
I think it’s just life lived. It’s the experiences of finding out that sometimes the picture we paint in our minds of how we think it’s going to be is completely different than how it turns out. Sometimes that’s for the better and sometimes that’s way harder.
Also I think about cumulative experiences, and about the places I got to travel because of music. Touring around the world, playing shows for people in the U.K. and Australia, and they know the second verses to songs I’ve written. That’s such a crazy thing to think about. My experiences on the road have definitely grown my capacity for seeing a community of music that’s bigger than your own backyard, and I love looking at music like that. It makes the world feel smaller in the best way.
It’s been a lot of experiences. It shaped this record I’ve just made, because for a while I lost my footing a little bit in going, “What artistically is my vision, and what do I want to say in these songs and talk about?” I had certain expectations that were like a moving bull’s-eye, and I got a little lost for a while. When I let that rest, I got back to the art of the truth of the matter, just songs I love that tell stories that are important to me.
I ended up making this record sitting in this spare room of my house, next to my dog. It’s this return to creatively tuning out all the noise around me and getting back to the truth underneath. All the experiences led to my hunger for that sparseness and return to self and that feels good.
You pursued every artist’s dream of a record deal, captured the dream, and walked away from the dream – which can be done in this DIY era. Still, it’s a breakup of sorts. Two years later, what are the lessons learned from being signed and from now being independent?
It really is a breakup of sorts. It’s this group of people that were working towards the same common goal beside me. We had such great experiences together and we moved a lot of mountains in our time together. But it got to this point of, “I think I’m losing myself in this.” It is such a unique opportunity right now, the power being back to the people, and being able to post something and have people get excited about it. There is the opportunity to have that freedom to make my own green lights for releasing music anytime it feels creatively right for me.
It took me a few years of unwinding from that structure and that system of how things used to be. There was a lot of heartache in that, a lot of feelings of failure for a while, and eventually busting out of that. I feel like I’ve gotten to this other side, where it is freedom and liberation and, “I get to do whatever I want now.”
With the label, we’d done vinyl before, but never this way. We launched this album online and I had this feeling in my gut that it needed to be a vinyl project. People got excited about it and it blew past all my expectations. I had planned to try to sell 300, which would have beaten my past goals. We launched it and I told the fans, “I’m doing this independently. Make this leap with me. You guys have been believing beside me for so long.” They totally embraced it. They took the leap and we sold over a thousand copies in one weekend of announcing the record. Feeling that support, I was like, “Wow, I feel so much more capable and able to take the leap into the unknown without the safety net of that system.” Feeling this supportive community behind what I’m doing, it was incredibly encouraging.
The Acrobat is obviously a deeply personal album, as are all your albums. You’ve spoken openly about your battles with mental health challenges, but as relates to this album, how was your mental health going into the creative process, during the process, and now?
I made this record in the heart of the mess and a lot of these songs were written in a really dark place. But I do feel, even though it’s a cliché to say this, the more I worked on this project, and the more I felt the liberating side of the freedom coming back to me, the better my mental health got.
This record was quite healing for me and the fact that I produced this myself and played everything on it was a moment of going, “I’m capable of doing this. I got this.” That feeling was really helpful in my mental health space. I didn’t seek out producing my own record and doing it this way. I started just making guitar vocals of some of my favorite songs that had never seen the light of day, so I could decide which ones to take into the studio for the next record. I got a handful done and I was like, “Wait. I really love these just like this. What if I did this myself? What if I recorded it here and made a record that’s really sparse and vulnerable and messy?”
I’ve never done that before. I’m not a master engineer of any sorts. A lot of the imperfections of this record, the truth that people can hear through it, are due to my limitations. None of these vocals are tuned, because I don’t know how to do that. It was a lesson in letting things be not perfect and that was helpful for my mental health, too. Coming to this place of, “I like this as it is,” and finding that strength on my own two feet again to be okay with that.
All in all, this record was a healing experience. I finished it and had this feeling of an exhale. So much of what I’ve walked through in the past few years is very much in the theme of these songs. There’s also this passage of time that I have a new appreciation for. Stepping back and looking at things from a different way and getting back to more vulnerability helped me see. I think that through line thematically is connected to being in a better state of mind as well.
Whatever happens to this record, I’m excited that people will get to hear it, and hopefully these songs will take on entirely different lives and meanings to other people. What I love about music is it’s so open for everyone’s own experiences, but the thread of emotion that runs through them is the same, and that’s something we can all hold on to together. I’m excited for the invitation of that, and whatever life it takes on beyond is great, but just the experience of making this record was so healing for me. That is a victory in itself, and I’m really grateful for that.
Is it paramount to find co-writers who understand your work from lived experience? What is your vetting process for opening up this way to someone who is going to have their input in your material?
Lived experience is so much a part of that, but also I have to feel safe around those people, to show up and be exactly who I am. There’s something disarming about a great co-writer who’s happy to sit with you in whatever you’re processing, and vice versa. Being a good co-writer means being a great listener. A lot of empathy has to be present, to me, in co-writers.
I’ve gotten to write songs with so many people through the years, and I’ve learned something new from every person. I’m always trying to be a sponge and soak in what somebody’s habits are, how they get past the little blocks that pop up in your mind, or how they keep diving in and not settling until you have complete peace about a line. Everybody’s got their own ways of doing that.
But, to me, it’s just feeling safe to really share the truth. That’s the vetting process. Sometimes that takes a few times and sometimes it happens on the first time. Music is such a magical mystery to me. I could sit with someone I’ve never had a conversation with before, but there’s something unspoken in the room, where you’re like, “Here’s what I’m going through,” and the other person is like, “Yeah, I’ve been there. Let’s talk about this. How can we unpack it?”
The song has its own agenda in the room, too. It’s this thing you can’t quite articulate, but when a song is supposed to be written, I believe it will be. I love getting to find out the characters that will help me pull out those songs. Sometimes it’s trusted friends and sometimes it’s complete strangers. It’s all such a magical thing.
On the Bobby Bones Show in 2024, you said every full record gets a new “time capsule” guitar. What’s your newest?
This album is an LG-2, and I love it. I’ve not had a Gibson before and it’s been so fun to play. I got this guitar a couple years ago, thinking that new music was a lot closer than it ended up being, so this guitar has been waiting in the wings for its moment. I wrote a lot of these songs on this guitar because it was on standby.
After I got to the point of “I think this is an album,” I was like, “I need to tattoo this guitar. It’s a match.” I met up with my friend Lewis Lavoie, who’s an incredible muralist painter in Alberta. I brought it to him and shared the different symbols and themes of the record. It was like, “There needs to be hands letting go.” There’s some azaleas from one of the lyric lines. “The Acrobat” is represented by a petal that turns into a bird, and that leads into “In Love With The Sky.” Every song has its moment on the guitar canvas. It’s a trilogy of the guitar time capsules I’ve made. I’m excited to take that one on the road.
How many guitars do you have?
I have two Martins that are tattooed as well. One was for The Lemonade Stand and one was for Masquerades, and the back was for Train Track Worktapes. I also have a Gibson electric that I love to play, an old D-28 that I love playing at home, and a Taylor 912ce that I got for my high school graduation. My family all wrote their names on little pieces of paper and tucked them into the case and I felt like I headed out into the world with this guitar in hand and all their love and support with it. My grandparents bought me my first guitar. It was a parlor size, not a Sears catalog guitar, but something close to that. It’s at my parents’ place in Canada. That was the first guitar I ever played. The stories that come with the guitars mean so much to me.
Does the guitar play as much a part as the lyrics in terms of expression and what you need to say?
Yeah. It’s really hard for me to separate the two. A lot of people will write the music and then write the lyrics. I respect that process, and I’ve written a couple songs that way, but to me, they really feed each other. I can’t hear the space for the melody and how many words need to make sense for it without the guitar laying that out. They’re like threads completely woven together. I enjoy taking away all the noise to leave space to hear how the guitar and vocal would interpret a song. That’s always the truest form to me. That’s the way I started as a kid, just playing songs in my room.
How do you protect yourself mentally and emotionally when you perform these songs?
There’s an exhale once the song has been recorded, and in the live experience it becomes so much more communal. I feel like my job up there is to hold open doors. Songs have ways of helping us sit inside the rooms in our hearts that are terrifying to go into alone, and the live experience is very much part of the exhale. It doesn’t hurt to relive it onstage as much as I might think it would, because it’s a part of something bigger.
I’m very nervous for these shows because there’s nothing else to fall back on. I’ll miss my band very much. I love those guys, so it’s going to be very different. But it feels timely for this creative season I’m in right now, and I think it will help me continue to build that intuition back even stronger. These shows are more of a living, breathing thing because it is just me up there. It’s going to be a two-way street with the audience and it will be a way for us to maybe chat a little bit, take some requests, and be less locked to a grid that five or six people are working towards the same goal on. It’s just me and the audience, so I’m pretty excited for that.
You posted a video last year in tandem with Mental Health Awareness Month, in which you said that you “came to a whole different low” the previous year and “depression doesn’t care how much you had a grip on positivity and gratitude.” What was different about that low, and how did you claw your way out?
It’s a process. There were a lot of personal changes in relationships for me, career shifts, and feeling a different kind of alone. The unending joy that music has always given me – it was such an indication that something was off, because that light was really dimmed. That was scary, because that has never gone away.
I consider myself a pretty positive person. I grew up learning tools of how to stay looking on the sunny side and all those things. But there’s also an avoidance of the truth that builds up over time, and that all caught up to me in that space, a lot of the people-pleasing tendencies and this realization that I was taking matters into my own hands again.
There’s such waves to it. Everybody’s experience with depression is different, but it’s this big scary thing to talk about because it is really scary. It’s dark. It’s so lonely and isolating and hard. I love when I see other people talk about it. It’s like, “Oh, I’m not the only one. Okay, good.” This is a part of the human experience, and we have to lean on each other to be able to know that it’s okay to feel that low sometimes and you’re not the only one.
I tried medication that helped and got me to a base level where I could go, “How else can I keep chipping away at this?” It’s not easy. It was an incredibly slow return of every day waking up and trying to have the right intention to take a step in a better direction for myself. So going for walks, trying to hit a certain amount of steps every day to keep my body moving, eating healthier foods, and being able to have friends that I force myself to check in with and be honest with.
Those things are not easy for me at all, but it’s part of the process and it definitely helps get me to this place. At that time I wasn’t creatively doing anything. Once I got a little bit better, I was able to start working on this record, and that really helped me continue the mental health journey.
How long were you in that dark place?
It was probably six to eight months of really dark. But I think it had been brewing for a long time and I had been denying its existence and covering it up. So it was a buildup, and then a slow, gradual return from there.
Was this your first experience with depression?
It was my first time acknowledging it for what it was. I think I’d experienced it before, but I hadn’t given myself permission for that to be okay, to be the truth.
Was it tough to record that video and say it publicly?
It was tough, for sure, but it also was part of the exhale. It was scary to make the video and press the button to post it. I didn’t want to do that, but after I did, the encouragement from the community and people reaching out going, “I have dealt with the same thing,” or “This helped me because I have been feeling the same way,” or whatever the responses, it’s like we give each other permission, and that encouraged me to do it, because I do love the community of people. It’s been a long ride, and I felt like I needed to be honest with what I was dealing with. It was powerful and encouraging to see that other people felt the same. It made a really lonely and isolating time feel a little less lonely.
Your awareness of and empathy for youth shelters, food banks, homelessness, the ills of the world, and now mental health, goes back to your school days, when you wrote a song from the perspective of a daughter whose father was in Afghanistan. Feeling so deeply for so many about so much, it’s easy to overload and spiral when you’re carrying everybody else’s struggles along with your own. How do you take care of yourself and find balance?
I don’t think I balance that very well at all, which is why I struggled for a long time. To me, it’s always keeping a connection to something greater than all of us. There’s different phases of what that’s looked like in my life, but that is what intuition is, just listening to that guiding force. If I keep that in check, then my compass tells me what to hold on to and what to let go of. When that “check engine” light is on, I know I’ve got to pay attention and get back to that.
I’m still learning what that balance is, and I don’t have all the answers at all, because I do feel things quite deeply. Maybe that’s an empath thing. I think that’s also part of being a creative and part of being a writer. You have to soak things in and feel them to a certain degree for it to become real in your own interpretation, so that you can write about it. Keeping those channels open is important to me, but I’m still learning ways to protect my own heart in that process.
Music is a big part of your healing, but dog lovers also understand canine therapy. Tell us about Sam.
Sam is 6. He is a pandemic baby. I found him on Petfinder and got him from a rescue in Illinois. He’s been my buddy ever since. He’s coming with me on tour. Because it’s an acoustic show, it’s a smaller crew – just my tour manager, my sound guy, and Sam and I – so Sam’s able to come on his first tour. I’m pretty excited about it.
Sam gets an unwritten executive producer role on this project, for sure, an emotional support credit. I’d be lost without this little guy. He brings me so much joy, but also a dog will force you to be present and in the moment. They need to go outside right now. They need to go for a walk. They need to get out of bed in the morning because they’re hungry. This beautiful creature is a constant reminder of showing up as your most authentic self in every moment. Sam is the perfect example of that.
They’re also such intuitive creatures. In some of those really dark times, he just knew. He would come snuggle right up beside me and put his little chin on my knee like, “Hey, I got you.” I’m so grateful to know and experience that kind of unconditional love from this beautiful little guy. There’s nothing like it.
When people listen to The Acrobat, what do you hope they learn about you, and maybe also about themselves, through your songs?
I hope they hear the courage it took to get to this sort of honesty, and that they feel permission to stand on their own two feet as well. This returning to autonomy, and this ability to let things go and embrace change, even when it’s hard and feels like the worst thing in the world, I hope they feel comforted that somebody else knows what that feels like and that they’re not alone.
That’s always the greatest mission of my music. I hope it helps people feel a little less alone, and that’s definitely one of my hopes with this record. I think there’s a lot more humanness when we talk about these things. That’s what I love about music. It opens the door for those conversations.
Continue exploring our Artist of the Month coverage of Tenille Towneshere.
(Editor’s Note: This article originally published on Good Country in December 2024. At that time, Good Country content was available exclusively on Substack.
Townes was included as part of our end-of-year coverage in 2024, examining how many country artists across the continent have blurred genre lines to connect with new audiences and plumb greater depths of self-expression. Jewly Hight spoke to Townes about her recently becoming an independent artist at that time and together they examined where she stood and where she was headed.
Now, on April 10, 2026, Townes will release the first full-length album of her independent era, The Acrobat. To celebrate, we’re naming her our Good Country and BGS Artist of the Month. And we’re re-sharing this piece from the archives to kick off the month. Below, enjoy an excellent interview on our website for the first time and check out our Essential Tenille Townes playlist. Dive into our brand new feature interview with Townes on The Acrobat and a special bonus article of Townes in her own words.)
“Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?” Linda Martell poses rhetorically during the spoken intro to “Spaghettii,” roughly halfway through Beyoncé’s western epic Cowboy Carter.
“In theory,” Martell goes on with sly poise, “they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined.” Martell knows what she’s talked about. She endured all manner of efforts to hem in her musical sensibilities and diminish her agency back when she was country music’s most visible Black, female talent.
And now, because she lent her voice to a track where Bey and Shaboozey go hard with down-home boasts over a lurching beat, she’s up for a GRAMMY for Best Melodic Rap Performance. Other tracks from Cowboy Carter are in pop, country and even Americana contention, a staggering range of styles for one project to cover.
That’s the kind of boundary-blurring year it’s been, with Shaboozey translating country gestures and imagery to broody, contemporary hip-hop cadences with tremendous savvy and both Jelly Roll and Post Malone furthering their paths from rap origins to ever more fully embracing – and being embraced by – the country music industry.
Things haven’t been any tidier on the rootsy side of the spectrum. After being treated like a pop prodigal during her Star-Crossed era, Kacey Musgraves’ shimmering, urban folk revival-echoing ruminations on Deeper Well have been received as a country homecoming of sorts. Noah Kahan has helped bring on a resurgence of cozily folk-forward, singer-songwriter sensibilities in pop music.
A major country record label snatched up the Red Clay Strays, the type of crowd-pleasing, Southern blues-rockers that have long been celebrated in the Americana scene, where many other pivotal voices – first Allison Russell last year, then Sarah Jarosz, Amythyst Kiah, Adeem the Artist, Kaia Kater and others – experimented with lusher or more polished arrangements and production aesthetics in their latest work.
Tenille Townes offers us a particularly compelling example of an artist charting her course against the background of that extreme slippage between genre lineage, stylistic markers, and industry affiliation. She tried the major label country route in 2018, greeted as a promising new voice at a moment when the broad appeal of Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour ruminations made the industry a little more receptive to artists with a personalized, writerly bent, and she’s emerged independent on the other side. In her mind, being unfettered in a time of great genre fluidity is cause for optimism.
Townes began her tenure on Columbia Nashville with spare acoustic recordings, and concluded it this year in similar fashion. She was, and remains, an ardently openhearted singer-songwriter, bent on tapping deep veins of empathy whether she’s in observational or confessional mode. When I first interviewed her, it made all the sense in the world to hear her say she felt a kinship to singer-songwriters like Patty Griffin and Lori McKenna. It also struck me that Townes’ singing – curling syllables and stretching out lines with feeling, a style sometimes called “cursive” singing – was far from the hearty enunciation for which country music has been known.
In between then and now, Townes dropped an album that bore a super-producer’s digitally sharpened touch, won a pair of ACM awards to go with the pile of honors she’s received from the Canadian Country Music Association – which began to recognize her promise when she was a teen with dreams of pursuing music beyond Grande Prairie, Alberta – and she toured with big country names like Miranda Lambert and Dierks Bentley. Townes also faced enough professional hurdles, and observed enough changes in the landscape around her, to reconsider where her songs might belong. And I very much wanted to hear about that.
You’re presently on tour in Canada, aren’t you?
Tenille Townes: I’m having the best time on this run. It feels like a community at these shows. We’ve done a few tours through Canada at this point, but this was our first time going as far east as we did. I feel like live music in general is a little bit more scarce over there. They don’t get as many people making the trek. And so [I could feel] the appreciation.
They sold out the shows so fast and they’re singing all the words. And very quietly listening intently and leaning in a really vulnerable way. And then also having a blast and being loud, which is so cool to me, for it to feel like a living room and a rock club at the same time. That’s been such a big part of my vision.
I don’t know how far out you planned this tour, but I wonder if it’s become an important chance for you to return to your home turf, regroup and get reinvigorated.
Yeah, it honestly feels really essential in my creative journey. I could not be more grateful for the way the timing has aligned this year for this moment on the road. It feels like the ingredient that I’ve been craving. In January, I’m going to be so ready to dive in with my whole heart and make [the music] I’m going to share next. I don’t think that the recipe could have ever been complete without this tour in this moment. It feels so timely, because so much of this past year has felt terrifying.
And just standing on my own two feet as an artist again, pretty much entirely, I feel so excited and grateful to be making this leap into the arms of these people showing up at the shows who are so excited about this new chapter. And it’s such a wave of encouragement to go, “Oh yeah, I think I’m on the right path, doing the right thing.”
How is it different from when you’ve toured the U.S., in terms of headlining versus being an opener, the size of venues and how you’re engaging with the audience?
There’s been a lot of theaters for us on this run, which have a bigger capacity than some of the clubs that we’ve played in these towns before. It’s our first time playing a handful of these [places], but this is our third headlining tour in Canada.
What I noticed that’s different is when it’s our shows and our community, it just feels like people show up with open arms and they’re requesting songs that I haven’t played in so long. They know the deep cuts. They’re showing up excited for a night of feeling whatever they need to feel. And I think that emotional permission feels different at our shows than it does at a show where we’re a guest [in the opening slot] going to make some new friends. And it’s been really cool hearing from people that were like, “I saw you on the Dierks [Bentley] tour and this is our third Tenille show.”
One thing I always say at the top of the shows is I want our time together around my songs to be a place where everyone who walks in the door feels safe to show up and be whoever they are and to feel embraced and welcomed for that. And I thank everyone for buying a ticket and for showing up as that community. And I really feel like they’re embodying what that means.
Years back, I took note of the fact that Corb Lund had what was considered fairly mainstream country success in Canada, but he played Americana events when he came to Nashville. I’m curious whether you’ve seen folk, Americana and country are treated as separate genre categories in the Canadian market, like they are in the U.S. How do you tend to get categorized in Canada?
At least from my experience, it feels different to me. Because in Canada, I have been really grateful to have felt super embraced by the country community, by the CCMAs, by country radio, by the community of people listening to country music. And we have fit in that bubble there. And I don’t know that we fit the same way in the States.
I relate to what you’re saying about Corb Lund. I think maybe the lane is just not as narrow in Canada. And I think that they’re just more in it for live music of any capacity. I think most fans [who come see me] would be like, “Oh, I’m at a country show.” Which is funny because when we play shows here, that doesn’t necessarily feel the same. I do feel like the Canadian country music community definitely jumped on board with what I’m creating. And the music [I release in both markets] is very much the same, so it’s so strange.
I will say that the people coming to our shows, our headline club shows that we’ve done in the U.S., they feel very similar, like-minded people to me.
You’re a little more than a decade into your Nashville tenure at this point. Why is it important to you to stay?
Even though this town has a lot of jagged edges or hard things about it, I really do still feel inspired here. I feel like there’s a tapestry of artists who have come to this town with their dream and worked at sharing their art and building a group of friends and people around them who support that. I have a front row seat, you know, going to an Emmylou Harris fundraiser at City Winery and watching all of these people that she’s embraced in her life that she’s written with or jammed with that’s really a legacy.
I love this community, and I do feel inspired musically, having access to so many songwriters and musicians and producers. There is a heartbeat to this town that I want to continue to be present in and be a part of for sure.
I can picture the show that you were just describing. The atmosphere was very similar at the tribute to Mary Gauthier during Americanafest, a multi-generational gathering of Nashville’s singer-songwriter community.
When we first talked all those years ago, you described being an astute student in Nashville, paying particular attention to singer-songwriters like Lori McKenna and Patty Griffin. At the time, you considered them touchstones because of how they used the language of the heart in their storytelling.
In terms of their career arcs, their material’s been recorded by big names in country, but as respected as they are among songwriting connoisseurs in that world, they’ve had contemporary folk careers as performers. They’ve often released their music on independent labels. Were you also taking note of what their professional paths have looked like? Or are you now?
I honestly don’t know that I was conscious of it back then. It was just the music that I loved. I don’t think I even had an understanding of the choices made on an artist’s path to stay true to that route.
I’ve learned a lot in the last handful of years: “Oh, that makes sense why a certain path, like Patty Griffin’s, unfolds in a certain way.” I never thought of it as a ceiling or an alternate route. It just was where the music had taken her. That’s been inspiring to me.
I never want to look at any options of teams to work with or whatever with any closed-doors feelings. I would love to play the music that I make in stadiums. That’d be great if that still unfolds that way. But I also just really want to tell my stories and my truth, and whoever is going to come as the audience, that’s amazing to me. The idea of seeing it as a wider horizon than maybe a stereotypical path, that doesn’t seem scary to me. I think that’s because I’ve looked up to people like Patty or Lori, people who have always stayed true to what they’re doing and figured out the path there regardless. But I don’t know if I’ve ever actually intentionally thought about it that way.
Your intention has been clearer than ever this year. It wasn’t lost on me that the final two songs you released earlier this year, before you parted ways with your label – “As You Are” and “The Thing That Brought Me Here” – each were expressions of commitment to staying the course. What did you want to communicate?
I love that you noticed these themes. At the end of that journey, “As You Are” felt like such a great theme to end that season on. There was lots of resistance [from the label] in several years of working on music and getting to a point of actually getting to put it out. But that song always had a green light from them, which I really appreciated.
I wrote that song thinking it was about showing up and being a support system for someone. I had friends in mind that I was thinking of. It was just like, “I will be that safe place.” And then listening back to the demo after the [session] on the drive home, I was like, “No, I wrote this ‘cause this is what I want to hear when I’m struggling to let somebody in.” That’s been something that I’ve felt even in my professional journey for sure, just wanting to feel seen.
It really seems like you’re the one communicating on your own TikTok. In recent months, a lot of your posts have been about celebrating your professionally “single” era. When you shared the news that you were no longer in your major label deal, you framed it as a breakup that you were happy about. What felt right about striking that tone?
It felt honest. It was a lot building up to that decision, and it was not easy, and it was terrifying. All of those emotions were a part of it. I just felt like, “I can’t continue to share the music I want to make if I’m not letting people in on my process of that vulnerability, even when it’s hard.” Making those videos felt scary, for sure. But that just feels like the kind of artist that I want to be, to walk the walk.
Also part of my intention was, “This is something that creatively feels really empowering to me, to take back the ownership of my music.” And for any young girls out there, I want them to know, “That’s a possible feeling for you, to stand up for yourself at any moment in any kind of career, or on any path of your life.” It’s brave to take that step. And I guess I just want that invitation to be there for anyone following along.
And I want to bring together the community of people. Like, it is an “independent artist,” but I think it should be called a “community village artist,” because you can’t get your stuff out there without people believing in what you’re doing and coming with you. I wanted it to be very clear that we’re in this together. We’ve always been in it together, but it feels very defined to me now. And I wanted to make sure everyone knew that.
And now we have the benefit of accumulated perspective, so I want to reflect back. At the beginning of your label journey, what was in the atmosphere at the time in Nashville or the country music scene in the U.S. that contributed to a sense of possibility for you?
At the beginning, it was excitement. And [I] look back and think, “How crazy cool that I got to be a part of a major label deal that let me put out a debut single about homelessness, and then follow it up with a song called ‘Jersey on a Wall’ about losing someone in a car accident?” I’m so glad they gave me a chance to put out songs that were different and that sonically didn’t sound like a sure bet. I will always appreciate that. And it set me up with so many people who heard this record and the songs because of the way that they helped lift it up.
So I have nothing but love for that season. It might not have hit the thing over all of the world’s fences by any measure of what you measure as success. But to me, it’s a win to think that I got to share that art and that people found it and that they get to keep finding it because of that.
Years back, you told me that in one of your initial meetings, when you played some songs in a boardroom, the head of the label compared you with Jeff Buckley, which was a funny thing. In hindsight, I think that kind of speaks to the fact that you were bringing a sensibility as a singer-songwriter that might’ve been a little bit outside of their frame of reference.
And maybe the Jeff Buckley comparison – as much of a stretch as it was – was a gesture of someone who lacked the frame of reference or language for what they were hearing. Because the way you elongate your vocal phrases and hold onto lines is more akin to the “cursive” singing style that’s been a thing in indie music, folk, pop and R&B than in country, with its crisp enunciation. What kinds of conversations did you have about what you were doing, how they heard it and how they thought it fit into that world?
It is really fun to reflect on that. I definitely think from that initial meeting, they were going, “This is something that doesn’t necessarily fit in what that normal trajectory would be.”
I think that has been the compass that’s directed it a little bit left of where things would traditionally fit coming out of the system that they’re used to. I think they knew that all along. And at moments, that definitely made things a little bit bumpier or harder, because it wasn’t something that naturally made all the sense in the world, I don’t think. And I’m totally great with that.
I revisited the body of work that you released on the label, and I didn’t hear you bending your songwriting approach, singing style or artistic identity to any kind of mold that was really popular in country music at the time. What did it take to maintain that?
There was never an intention of, “Okay, that’s mainstream, so I’m closing the door to that.” I’ve always felt very openhearted in the writing room. It’s just what was coming out of what I was making that I loved the most. The Lemonade Stand came out in 2020. Then I wrote the songs for Masquerades all on Zoom in my house by myself. It was a time when I didn’t feel as much outside influence of commerciality. I was just honestly writing to express something and feel better.
We certainly, production-wise, had moments of trying to be strategic about what kind of things might — I don’t know — reach more people or something, or sonically be something that could be more mainstream. So there wasn’t a lack of strategy in that. I just had to follow the songs, I think.
On TikTok, you’ve shared clips of songs that you’ve had in the can for years that you said the label didn’t want to release. How did the disagreements over your artistic direction begin to emerge? And what was at stake for you when they did?
I think the biggest rub maybe was being able to plan far enough down an artistic vision, because it was just like, “We’ll see how this one does.” And the targets just kept moving. Mentioning putting out an EP or a record was scary. They were like, “No, we can’t. We gotta just take it one step at a time.” So I think that became the hardest thing, and where a lot of songs fell through the cracks, because we didn’t hit certain measures to be able to go to the next. We still found ways to push through and get music out. It just didn’t happen in a guaranteed, planned-out manner, necessarily.
What brought you to the place where you were ready to part ways?
I could feel it building for a while, for sure. And when it came to the point of putting out “As You Are,” there was a group of songs that were ready, and we were just getting resistance on putting out more than one or two out again. And honestly, they came to us and [said], “I don’t think we can put out the rest of these.” And it was like, “Okay, I think it’s time to go.” It wasn’t like I’d arrived at this place of courage. Circumstances were like, “Okay, I think the arrows are really pointing that this is the moment to take the leap, and I’m just going to do it.”
What did you see yourself as leaving behind and moving towards instead?
The idea of taking back ownership of what I create and jumping into this place of freedom in the sense of less hoops to get through to actually get songs to people. I think creatively, I needed change as well.
I’m so proud of that whole journey. I have no regrets, but in a lot of ways, it’s like the metaphor of having a [limited] number of crayons in your hand and trying to make a picture out of that. I felt I wanted the whole box back. I never felt like I was trying to create something to fit within [the industry], but I do feel like that kind of a system can’t not have an effect on what you’re doing creatively. I feel this freedom in my hands. What do you do? That’s a whole other process that I’m in the middle of right now, trying to figure out exactly what I want to say and how I want to sound next. It’s so liberating, and it’s also just, “Oh, this is up to me now.”
When you look back on it, do you think that label partnership was no longer the right fit for you, or that the mainstream country marketplace that it exists in was not the right fit for you?
I don’t know. I think maybe a little bit of both. But mostly, I think the major label system just ran its course for me. And I feel open to whatever team there may or may not be in the future. I wouldn’t write that experience off ever again. I think it just depends on the season I’m in creatively and what people are behind it.
What’s funny to me is looking back on the history of country music, the things that have [at certain moments] laid on the outside have actually [become] pillars of what’s created the format that we love and know. So it doesn’t scare me to [say], “I don’t actually feel like I belong in what we call right now the mainstream of country music.” I’m just going to do my thing and whatever we want to call it later, looking back, it’s fine with me.
Earlier we were talking about the singer-songwriter ecosystem that’s long existed in Nashville and has amorphous boundaries – those songwriters play their own intimate shows and write for bigger names in other lanes.
But there’s been far more visible crossing of boundaries than that this year. We’ve had pop superstars going country, and Kacey Musgraves – who never fully left her country label, but was viewed as drifting towards pop – made a folk-pop album that’s gotten her country awards nominations again. And then there are artists like Noah Kahan. I know you’ve expressed admiration for what he does. He’s been having great success with songs that are grounded in folk, but he exists in the pop world – and yet he’s also gotten Americana and country nominations. Have you been looking around you and taking note of how other artists are transcending genre boundaries?
Yes, and it feels so encouraging to be like, “How about you just make what’s you?” And then, what if there are different categories of music lovers who want to listen to stories and songs and voices and actually don’t care what sticker you put on it?
[As for] Noah, that’s just songs that are speaking to people at such a loud volume. I don’t know what you call it, and it doesn’t matter. Longterm-wise, I think Brandi Carlile’s path is a flashlight, to have something that’s just evolved with her as an artist and fit in so many different places. And I think about Patty Griffin. Even somebody like Billy Strings, Marcus King, I think is incredibly inspiring looking at all of these people who are not sticking to one lane.
You are actively narrating the decision-making process for your audience and frequently discussing what it looks like to be an independent artist, what that means, what your aims are, what challenges you face. From what I’ve read, you’ve kept some important parts of your team, management and publishing, but other aspects of the model have changed. What do you feel are the most significant differences in how you’re operating at the moment? What do you most want people to know about your present reality?
I think the biggest shift is how much making videos is a part of actually getting a song to be heard at all. And the creative output of just trying to make noise in a place that’s got way too much noise going on, the internet. That’s the most overwhelming thing that’s very different than what I thought it meant to be a singer-songwriter and write songs and tour.
I’m trying to balance the creative output of constantly being like, “Hey, I’m over here. This is what I’m working on.” And also making sure that my soul is in a good place, not just spinning on a hamster wheel, so that I can make something that I’m really proud to stand on in my life.
I’ve heard that you are working on new music. Are you broadening your circle of collaborators?
Yeah, definitely. I’ve been reaching out to people I’ve not written with before, people I’m just fans of their music and [asking], “Hey, let’s write or let’s get together and just jam.” And then I’m in the stage [where] I’m always writing. I’m at a point where I have a lot of songs and I’m trying to just zoom out and go, “Which ones are speaking the loudest to me?” The theme for me right now is very much about betting on yourself and getting to the heart of the matter without everything feeling too heavy and serious.
I’m at the spot of taking song inventory and trying to make some new friends and keep writing, and working on what might be next.
Won’t it be wild if you have an album that is on a Canadian country chart and then in the U.S., is on Americana and folk charts, the same collection of songs?
I think it’s possible. I believe it is. I love you putting that out there. I’m declaring it right now.
The expression of music is going to fit differently in different places. And I think that’s more possible in the landscape we’re in now than it ever has been.
Read our 2026 interview with Tenille Townes on her brand new album, The Acrobat, here.
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Photo Credit: Lead image by Madison Rensing; inset image by Robert Chavers.
Depending on who you ask, Jake Owen might be responsible for the very first bro country song. His 2011 hit “Barefoot Blue Jean Night” wasn’t the first party-ready ode to Southern summers and ice-cold beer, but its slick mix of country signifiers and stadium-rock production – courtesy of Joey Moi, best known for producing Nickelback and later Morgan Wallen – proved highly influential, arguably paving the way for crossover smashes like Florida Georgia Line’s “Cruise” and Blake Shelton’s “Boys ‘Round Here.”
“Never gonna grow up, never gonna slow down,” Owen sang on his signature hit, neatly summing up the youth-obsessed ethos of the bro country era. Now 44 and newly independent after 20 years on RCA Nashville and later Big Loud, he’s singing a different tune.
“I’ve made a lot of records that had a fantasy, ‘Remember when we were young?’ kind of feel to them,” Owen told Good Country. “What feels good about this new record is that I can listen to it and feel like I’m listening to my life right now. It’s very real.”
Dreams to Dream, Owen’s eighth studio album and his first with Shooter Jennings producing, is a sharp left turn for an artist known for hits like “Beachin,’” “I Was Jack (You Were Diane),” and “American Country Love Song.” Earlier this year, Owen decamped to LA amid the wildfires, leaving the comfort of Nashville behind in search of creative truth and a more organic sound. The result is one of the year’s best and most surprising country albums, which trades bro-ish bravado for world-weary introspection and a classic-country sensibility.
The title track is a rollicking, country-rock statement of purpose that name-checks Hank Williams, Jr. and establishes the stakes: “I’ve been down, but I ain’t no quitter/ ‘Bout to get up on my feet/ ‘Cause I still got dreams to dream,” Owen sings in the rousing chorus. On the Troy Jones-penned “Wouldn’t Be Gone,” he muses about leaving stardom behind to work in a hardware store. (“I already know a thing or two about hardwood floors,” goes the song’s best line.) Other standouts include “Chill of December,” a Haggardian expression of winter loneliness, and “The One I Did It To,” a doleful admission of romantic wrongdoing.
In a Q&A, Owen spoke to Good Country about teaming up with Jennings, defining authenticity on his own terms, and why he doesn’t shy away from his bro country past.
This album is a departure from the sound that you’re best known for. What made now the right time to do an album like this?
Jake Owen: My life has always been about timing and believing that I’m supposed to be where I am. The album’s called Dreams to Dream and it came about because I was in this interesting place in my life where I’ve had a record deal for 20 years and, all of a sudden, I’m doing something on my own. Which felt kind of like freedom, but also felt very scary.
For a long time I was focused on the more commercialized songs that would work on radio, since I was on a major label, and I felt like this is the time to make the kind of record that I’ve always really loved. I’ve always tried to follow my heart and what my intuitions have told me. They haven’t always been right, but I definitely follow them.
What was it like working with Shooter Jennings?
He really exceeded my expectations. I expected to go out there and make a record, but I didn’t know I would leave there with an awesome new friend and somebody that really believed in me as a person with dreams and a purpose and things they wanted to say. He was so encouraging to me. I felt safe with him, which is a weird way to put it, I guess. But you need people to pat you on the back and tell you that you’re doing the right thing.
It also was at a time when – I’m not ashamed to say it – there were not a lot of people ringing my phone in Nashville to tell me they were proud of 20 years of what I’d done in my career and 11 number one songs. Kind of weird, right? But the one guy that was calling me and applauding me and telling me that I could do way better, bigger things in my life than what I’d already done was Shooter Jennings. Out of all people, right? That says so much about how much he loves music and believes in people. I think you’d probably hear that same answer from anybody else that he’s worked with.
The second song on the album, “Them Old Love Songs,” is a Waylon Jennings cover. Why did covering Waylon make sense for this record?
Well, there was no part of me going out there that thought I would do any covers. But Shooter and I just talked about life and music out there, and he was saying that his dad always would cut cover songs for fun when he came off the road. Shooter would encourage me, each night or whenever we were done with the session, to do some covers and just have some fun. With that one in particular, I was nervous to ask Shooter, because it felt a little cliché. I wondered how many people work with him and have wanted to do that or if he’s offended by that.
But I always loved that song and the album that it’s on, Are You Ready for the Country. It’s pretty wild, because that album starts off really rocking, and then it goes into that. To me, if you listen to that song, the lyrics say, “I wish I had a true fine woman/ Let her rock me all night long/ And maybe we could get it together/ Like people do in them old love songs.” I’ve been singing that my whole life and it’s still the way I dream of love. And then, going back to the first verse, it says, “Nobody cares where I’m going, all they know is I’m coming back.” I don’t think anybody cared that I was going to make a record with Shooter. Nobody really even knew.
Also, one of the reasons Shooter and I decided to make this album was our love for the Hank Williams Jr. record, The New South, that his dad actually produced. Hank moved to Alabama to make that album, I think it was in 1977, and said he needed to get out of Music City because he wanted to go make his kind of music with his friends. And I felt the same way. Like, here I am going to LA to make a record with Shooter, and he’s encouraging me like Waylon encouraged Hank. So recording that Waylon song, with Shooter producing it, it just felt right.
You recently celebrated the 20-year anniversary of moving to Nashville and signing your first record deal with RCA. You made a post referring to “the highest of highs and lowest of lows” in your career. Could you tell me about some of those highs and lows?
Yeah, well, first off, thanks for even acknowledging that, which I think is important to the reasoning behind this whole record in general. I would start off by telling you that the highest high for me was just moving to Nashville and knowing that something was ahead of me. When I left college, I left my twin brother and a lot of my friends and my entire family at home in Florida. I still look back on that guy, and I’m like, “What the fuck was I thinking?” But I guess I just had to chase it. And then getting to Nashville and immersing yourself with people that are so much better than you are, I just didn’t have that where I was in college in Tallahassee. I kind of felt alone. Getting a record deal was also a big part of that, feeling like I had accomplished part of what I came here to do. And then I spent the next seven years having to figure out how to keep the guys in the band paid and the buses rolling on the road and how to get my first number one song. Everybody thinks that’s the easy part once you sign the record deal, but it really wasn’t. It was a rude awakening.
And I went through a divorce. I got married, I had a kid. It’s like the classic country song shit, man. I think that was a big low for me, having to leave my family to go on the road. I had been very successful from my dreams that I chased, but the one thing that I probably desired the most, outside of music, was a family life. The one thing that I’ve never been good at and I haven’t figured out is that real solid relationship in life, building love and trust, and that bothers me a lot. It bothers me that I can be good at a lot of other things, and that is the most important thing to me, and I haven’t been so great at it.
You were a major player in the bro country era, which is now having this sort of nostalgic reappraisal. I’m thinking of the HARDY and Ernest song “Bro Country,” which is an ode to that time in country music. When you think about that era, what goes through your mind?
It’s funny, because I don’t know that anybody has said this before, but I’ll tell you right now: I started that shit. Everybody wants to shy away from bro country or whatever, but I invented that shit. And yeah, I am proud, in a way. I remember being at a time in my career where I had a record deal for seven or eight years and I had a couple songs that had done all right, but I was feeling like I was gonna lose my record deal if I didn’t try to do some different shit. And I didn’t have a producer at the time. I’d left Tony Brown, who was great. And he’s like, “Hey, man, you should meet this guy, Joey Moi. I think he’d be great for you.”
Joey obviously came from Nickelback and all that. At the time, no different than when I left Tallahassee for Nashville, everybody was like, “Dude, what the fuck are you doing?” So here’s a guy now from Nickelback who’s gonna try out making country music on me, which was probably a crazy thing, too. It wasn’t that I was trying to sell out. If anything, I look back and I’m like, “Dude, I had the balls to just do something different at the time.”
“Barefoot Blue Jean Night” was our first release and it had all of these claps and stomps and loop shit. It ended up being the most-played song of the decade [according to Country Aircheck]. I have the plaque on my wall. It was a major, major changing point in my life and career, because it worked. Not only did I keep making those songs for the next few years, but it influenced a shit-ton of people.
I think a lot of people might want to avoid that association. It’s kind of like the way that ‘80s rock and roll gets shit on sometimes, but there are still people in their cars cranking it to 11, right? If you look back at my early career, the songs I was writing were very country, because that’s what I always loved. I went on tour with Brooks & Dunn and Alan Jackson. So when all of a sudden, years later, all of the people that were my heroes were like, “I hate this kid,” it kind of hurt my feelings. But I always knew in my heart that I would get back to what brought me to the table.
Among the detractors you alluded to, people who are into more traditional-sounding country music, there’s this idea that pop-country or bro country is inauthentic. What do you think is “authentic” country music?
Authenticity is the ability for artists to take any type of music and just make it their own. Johnny Cash never shot a man in Reno. But it was a huge song for him. George Jones didn’t write “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” but he owns that song. Stardust is the biggest album Willie Nelson ever released and he didn’t write a single song on it. And he’s one of the greatest songwriters of all time. Authenticity isn’t about where somebody’s from or how they grew up. If you own what you’re doing, and you deliver it in a way that’s believable, I think that’s authentic.
I’m thinking now of this back-and-forth you had with Jason Isbell a couple years ago about artists writing their own songs.
Yeah, dude. That guy. I love Jason Isbell, that’s what’s crazy. Some of the artists that I love the most just spout off at the mouth. The other day I said something about Zach Bryan. I love that guy’s music too, right? He’s amazing, and he’s also uber successful – selling 120,000 tickets or whatever, which I could never even fathom. And Jason is out winning GRAMMYs on top of being an incredible guitar player, so much more talented than I could ever dream of being. But I don’t understand why guys like that will take the time on shit on someone else’s music.
That’s never made sense to me and it’s always made me want to just ask that question directly to them. Which is what I did to Jason. I was just like, “Dude, I’m not going to get into an argument with you over Twitter, so give me your number. I’m going to just call you and have a conversation about why you feel this way.” He and I had a great conversation. And he was very cool to acknowledge and entertain my questioning behind why he would just spout at the mouth about stuff like that. We both ended it at the time – and this was years ago, when I was drinking, or maybe he was – he’s like, “Dude, we should catch a beer sometime.”
So, to go back to the authenticity thing, there’s so many people that are so great at a lot of things. One of my absolute favorite artists right now is Charley Crockett and he does that, too. I wonder, sometimes, I’m like, “Why are you guys all trying to prove to one another that you’re more authentic than the next guy?” Sorry, you can tell I’m getting tense talking about it. But I’m confused by it, because those guys make some of my favorite music and it bothers me that they feel the need to try to blow somebody else’s candle out in order to make their already blazing one shining brighter.
I wonder if part of you wanted to prove to that type of person that you could make one of these really rooted, quote-unquote “authentic,” hardcore country records.
I think it was about proving to myself what my intuitions are and what my beliefs have always been about what’s right for me. I also really needed somebody to tell me that what I was doing was the right decision, and Shooter never wavered. He was constantly telling me, “Dude, this is it. You’re going to open up a Pandora’s box for your career in ways that I don’t think you’ve seen before.” I will say that it’s definitely opened my eyes to a lot of things and a lot of people reached out to me that have never reached out to me before.
One of my favorite songwriters, artists, people I’m a huge fan of is Brandy Clark. I think she’s incredible and just a brilliant songwriter. And she happened to be in LA when I was there and stopped by to see Shooter. She called me after and I just started crying. Because she was like, “Jake, I’m so happy for you. Like, I hear you in this.” It was just so fulfilling to hear that from her. She didn’t have to do that, but I was so moved by it.
I’m grateful for people that don’t think about music from a standpoint of judgment, but look at it as a possibility of something greater.
In the fall of 2004, it seemed like everybody was getting into Trouble. Even with that major label debut album, Ray LaMontagne managed to keep a low personal profile while maintaining the rigorous pace of a promising new artist. Meanwhile, the title track of Trouble got covered by that season’s winner of American Idol and ended up in an inescapable but kinda cute insurance commercial. Other cuts on the album ended up in films such as The Devil Wears Prada, Prime, and She’s the Man. In addition, Zac Brown Band recorded “Jolene” and Kelly Clarkson often performed “Shelter” in her shows (and recently revived it for Kellyoke.)
Now, LaMontagne is bringing Trouble back around for a 20th anniversary remaster and re-release (which dropped this summer) and North American and European tour dates set for 2026. He’ll be singing every song on the record to commemorate the collection two decades after its release.
“It’ll be interesting to see how my spirit reacts to learning these songs again, to going back and listening to them again in that way, to bring it to people again,” LaMontagne tells BGS. “I’m looking forward to it. And I feel like it’s important to do to mark this moment, because these are the songs that brought people to my music in the first place.
“Listening to it again now after all these years, I’m very proud of my younger self, for having the strength of will amidst all the pressures of the music business at the time, and about my writing and the way I wrote, to make the record that I did, and to leave the songs the way I wrote them and not take any advice.”
What was your day-to-day life like before Trouble was released?
Ray LaMontagne: Well, we lived off the grid. I was already married for six or seven years at that point. My two boys were five and three and we lived on a piece of land I bought in Maine. I had built a small cabin on it and we had a hand-dug well that we used for water. We had an outhouse. It was back-to-the-land living and that was just because I couldn’t stand renting. I wanted to have my own piece of ground. But it was really hand to mouth, and we were broke. And that’s putting it mildly. I mean, we were broke, broke, broke. I was working carpentry, sometimes seven days a week, because I would take anything I could get on the weekends just to get a little extra money, because I constantly was trying to improve the cabin. And I never had a car that ran.
You’d made some independent records before Trouble and I’ve read a couple of accounts of how you got your music in front of Chrysalis Music. How did that actually happen?
Someone heard me at a festival and they gave a disc to a college friend who was in the music business. Then he brought it to his boss. I went out and met with Hollywood Records first. I felt that I was in a room with a bunch of cynical people who made me feel kind of gross. I went back home and that guy called and said, “I think they’re gonna offer you a record deal.” And I said, “I don’t want to do it.” He said, “Are you crazy? What do you mean, you don’t want to do it? They’re gonna give you a record deal!” And I was like, “I didn’t like them. They made me feel gross.” So I went back to being a carpenter again, as I was, and went back to my life.
Then it was close to a year later when that guy called me again and said he had gone to a different company. Now he was with a publisher and that was Chrysalis. He said, “I played your stuff for my boss and he really likes your songs and is interested in you as a songwriter. Would you come out and meet my boss?” I talked to my wife about it and then I said, “Okay, I’ll come out.” I went out and I met his boss and played a couple songs in the office. We talked about songwriting and he said, “We want to help you as a songwriter.”
So, they were looking at you as a songwriter rather than as an artist.
And that’s how I got into the studio to make this record, because I was supposed to go in and make demos. What happened was, Ethan [Johns, who produced Trouble] and I met each other for the first time. We’re very different people and we couldn’t quite read each other. Especially at that time, I was very much a closed book, very much an observer. And he’s a type A personality, big ego, big presence, loves to talk – mostly about himself. And I don’t say that critically, I say it with humor! Anyone who knows Ethan will agree with me!
So anyway, it was this strange thing, but I began to realize as we were starting to record demos or talk about songs, that they didn’t really feel like these songs were finished. They thought they were promising. But I was getting a lot of input coming at me very quickly about, “This song doesn’t have a bridge. This song is just two verses. Is that even a song? This song just has four verses and then it ends. Is that a song?” And it was like that right down the line.
The first demo we recorded was “Hold You in My Arms.” We got to a point in the song where Ethan stopped me and said, “This song is just not finished. It needs a bridge.” He started throwing lyrics at me for this bridge and my shield started to go up. I thought, “These lyrics, first of all, aren’t right…” I was resisting and resisting, and he was getting more frustrated with me. He said, “I’m gonna go make a cup of tea. You write a bridge.” So, he went to make a cup of tea and I wrote an instrumental bridge by the time he got back. I said, “It’s just gonna go into an instrumental bridge and then back into the chorus again.” And he said, “OK. I’ve always been told you gotta do this in the moment. So how many points do you think that’s worth?”
I knew nothing about the way these things happen, but in that moment I knew what was going on and I knew why I was there. From that moment on, I was a brick wall. Nothing was changing. I was changing nothing. I’m recording the songs exactly as I had written them and then I’m going home. If you like them and you want to shop them around, great. If you don’t like them, I’m still going home. It doesn’t matter to me, but I’m not playing this game. So that’s what we did. We recorded this record, which is basically the demos the way I wrote them.
How did the recordings go from demos into becoming the Trouble album?
Six months easily passed and the publisher called me and said, “You know, the songs are just… no one wants to sing the songs. No other artists are gravitating towards the songs, but weirdly, record labels are coming forward because they like your voice and they like what they’re hearing, but they like it delivered by you. It works when you sing it, but it’s not working for any other artist.” And that led to the next step of going back and meeting record labels and talking to people about me as a performer, which was not even on my radar.
So it was a whole other challenge. It was like me against my biggest fear. I was much more interested in being a songwriter at that time. So, that’s how it happened. Slowly, and one step at a time, and one thing led to another, and led to another. But again, that’s why, when I hear these songs at this point in my life, listening to it again for the first time, it really hits me, just where that 28- or 29-year-old guy had that strength of will to know at a gut level that what I was doing had value. Just me being me had some value and I wanted to protect that. And it just makes me very proud of him.
It’s interesting to hear that no other artists wanted to record your songs, because when this record came out, a lot of people were singing these songs. What’s the personal reward for you as a songwriter when someone does take one of these songs from the album and makes it their own?
I really like that. It always makes me happy. I think any songwriter would be happy if even one song gets covered by someone else. You feel lucky if one song you wrote even makes it into people’s lives in some meaningful way. If you’re a songwriter and that happens to you once, you’re grateful. I mean, it’s just the truth of it. It’s like any other art form. It’s not easy, and it either will work or it won’t work, because music is a complex language. … It’s probably the same with painters, with dancers, with writers. You just don’t know if it’s going to connect to people, or if people are going to understand what you’re saying, or if it’s going to speak to them in a real way, speak to their spirit in some way. So I’m very grateful. I’m so glad that there are people in the world, all over the world, who understand my language.
Something that struck me about this record, then and now, is that dynamic in your voice. At what point did you become aware of that range, that you could go loud when it when you needed to?
I don’t really know. I feel like I learned to sing just by doing it. There’s some truth to this, that I really didn’t know how to sing even when I went in to make the record. But I was learning by doing it. I had gotten to a certain point where I knew when I was singing incorrectly because I would be uncomfortable or something would hurt in my throat. And I knew that that wasn’t the right way to do it. At some point, I realized you had to really breathe and sing from your gut.
In 2004, before streaming and social media, how did you find an audience?
It was just live shows. I mean, I toured a lot. A lot. And in the beginning, even being signed, I was still just like anyone. I was in a rental car, just me and my guitar, a box of harmonicas, and getting myself from one gate to the next. Those early shows, again, it’s no different than anyone. It’s two or three people and the next year you go back and there’s 20 people and the next year you go back, there’s a hundred people. When people connect to what you’re doing, they will tell their friends about it, and they’ll bring them the next time you come around. But there’s nothing anyone can do outside of yourself to make that happen. It either works – people connect to what you’re doing, to your performance, to the music, and then they’ll tell their friends – or it doesn’t work. But being signed to a record label doesn’t mean anything. It just means they’re investing and they’re gambling. And if you build a career for yourself, then they win that bet, and if you don’t, then they move on.
I’ve read that you saw Townes Van Zandt play a show in the mid ‘90s and I wondered how much of an influence did he have on your writing and your musical direction for Trouble?
I don’t think he had a real heavy influence. I wouldn’t say that, especially at that time. It was too early. I just remember being really moved by watching him play, for a few different reasons. It’s kind of tragic in some ways. He was right at the end, but I could hear the poetry in the songs. That’s what moved me the most, to hear a song and be so close to somebody, eight feet away from him, and hear “Pancho and Lefty.” That story was completely immersive and took me somewhere else. That was really the most powerful thing I took from that particular night. He transported me. That’s powerful. Music can be really powerful if you’re receptive.
To me, your song “Narrow Escape” feels like a spiritual brother to “Pancho and Lefty.”
Yeah, I’m sure it is. I mean, it’s my take on a story song of this kind. They’re very different stories, but I’m sure that’s my “Pancho and Lefty.”
There’s a reference to “Liula” in that song and I noticed that fictional town shows up again, now, as the name of your own record company. So, are you fully independent these days?
I am, yeah. I still have all my same team around me, but I’m making records on my own and releasing them on my own. That’s a natural progression, too, in the way the music business has changed. It was a very different business when I entered it and at this point, especially for me, there’s no reason to be with a publisher or a record label at all. I left my publisher a long time ago, 10 years ago probably, and the record label followed.
I did want to ask about the illustration on the cover of Trouble. It’s not a picture of you. It’s this beautiful image from Jason Holley. What was it about that image that worked for you?
I just thought it was poetic. I saw the poetry in it. You can take lots of different things from that image, but it’s also just a powerful image. And of course, I have always been reticent to have my photograph taken, or to use my photos anywhere. Which, you know, we all have these things. If you’re comfortable doing it, that’s great. If you’re not comfortable, you should feel you have the right to say no.
Other than seeing you in concert, I don’t know that I really saw your face that much back then, when Trouble was out.
I remember telling my manager, “I want to be like the Lone Ranger. I don’t need to be seen and to be known. Just leave them with the music. And that’s it.” You can imagine how that went over. It was really, really difficult, and there were a lot of frustrated people, I’m sure, at the record label and with management. It frustrated a lot of people because they felt like I missed a lot of opportunities that I could have otherwise had. I knew that at the time as well.
But I’ve always felt like I know who I am. I could say no to a magazine cover back then because I know that that’s going to be a day out of my life where I’m going to be miserable, and it’s going to make me uncomfortable. … I’ve never felt like anyone in the press or who had a camera really cares about you as a person. They’re not sensitive to you, and your well-being doesn’t matter to them. They’re just doing their job. And whatever they capture there, they choose what they want. If you have your head in your hands, if you’re doing this, if you’re looking miserable. That’s power and they’re going to use it.
So, I turned down all of that stuff. You lose that opportunity, but I felt, well, I’ll lose that opportunity, true, but you know what? I’ve got a show tomorrow night, and I’m going to sing my ass off, and people are going to feel it. And if they feel it, they’ll come back next time. That’s what’s important, to build a career that is sustainable. And to do that, you need people to fill the seats. If they don’t come out to see you live, you have no career. That’s all there is to it. So that’s the most important thing. And that was then, and it still is.
The traditional path of a musician’s career would say that gaining a record label’s approval reflects a certain level of accomplishment and stature. That’s a good thing, right? It can be, but what makes for the right fit to a musician’s career – whether with a label or as an independent artist – largely depends on how a person wants to navigate the ebbs and flows that come with making music for a living.
Just over five years removed from her fourth full-length album, 25 Trips, the aforementioned fork in the road is exactly the juncture at which Hull recently found herself. Now bearing her fifth full-length album, A Tip Toe High Wire, the Nashville-based mandolinist and songwriter decided that the extra work of an independent release didn’t scare her.
In fact, Hull is someone who keeps busy – “I’m not good with time off,” she says – and A Tip Toe High Wire may turn out to be her most true-to-form album to date. From her collaborators – Béla Fleck, Tim O’Brien, Aoife O’Donovan, Lindsay Lou, Ronnie Bowman, Justin Moses, Ethan Jodziewicz, Geoff Saunders and more – to her co-writers, to production, arrangements, and underlying theme, every aspect of the record evokes Hull’s concentrated instincts as a musician, composer, and experienced public artist.
These songs let the rest of us know just a little more about the “who,” “how,” and “why” behind the music and how it fits into Hull’s life and of the lives of those she holds dear. It’s a multifaceted expression of individualism and independence while also being nowhere near a display of isolated work – truly a balancing act of coexisting contrasts.
BGS spoke with Sierra Hull by phone ahead of a packed tour, about the significance of going independent, embracing new ways of songwriting, how her perspective of making music has changed, and more.
How would you describe where you were creatively, between the release of 25 Trips and leading into this new independent recording?
Sierra Hull: Part of it is that I didn’t really have the opportunity to go out and tour 25 Trips. When things were starting to open up [after the pandemic shutdown], I put together this band that I’m touring with and was able to think about what I wanted the music to feel like on the heels of [COVID]. I tried to think about songs that would would feel fun to stand on a stage and perform, you know? And I think some of the context of moving into [A Tip Toe High Wire] was thinking about that.
[25 Trips] was also my last record as part of my Rounder Records contract. A Tip Toe High Wire just felt like this new chapter. And having fresh songs that I had started to write, having been inspired by the time off the road to write music, I kind of leaned into that. I was loving playing with this band and I felt like I had the freedom to not necessarily have outside chatter in my ear about what the next thing needed to be. It felt like an opportunity to just make music that I felt excited by and capture it. At first I wasn’t sure if it was going to become a record, or a single, or what it might be. But the further we got into it, I would just continue to book sessions that we could get in the studio and record in between all the touring.
I feel like [being independent] gives me more of an opportunity to have a direct offering and connection to my fans in a way that maybe I couldn’t have in another scenario, and it feels really important for me to have that in this moment.
How has your perspective of the music and album making process changed? What kind of goals did you set for yourself in this new career chapter?
I don’t know if my goals felt different, because the goal for me has never been to try to chase a particular thing or to please a certain kind of entity. But at the same time, when you’re independent, you get to call all the shots, you know? You decide when you’re recording, how you’re recording, when the music gets released, how it gets released, all that kind of stuff. It’s kind of like a difference of me deciding what’s on the puzzle pieces and then figuring out how to put the puzzle together, rather than just somebody handing you a puzzle and the picture is there already.
I often say, “If I was only making music for me, I could do that anytime I want.” I can sit at home in a room by myself and enjoy music that way. But I think that we as artists and performers, we create and we make stuff because we want to be able to share with people. We want to be able to share a common emotional experience with people. It’s the struggle between trusting yourself, and being vulnerable enough to receive the good things and knowledge that other people around me have to offer.
In deciding, “I’m going to do what I want to do,” it almost prompts the question, “Wouldn’t she have that figured out already?” It’s a nice reminder that there’s no timeline to connecting with self-discovery.
It’s funny, because I feel like it’s one of those things with every album I’ve made. [People say,] “She’s finally coming into her own” – it’s like that every chapter! But the truth is, that’s the human story at any level. You can be coming into your own your entire life. you know? It looks different at 16, and it looks different at 20, it looks different at 25, and it looks different now in my 30s.
There is a certain amount of weird calm that I feel about more things in my life and I think part of that is when you work hard throughout your 20s and there’s such a grind taking place. For me, I love the grind. I live for the work part of all this. Like I said, I’m not really good at just sitting around doing nothing so I’d rather be working than not. But at the same time, I need to not clench my hands too tightly around the thing that is my art and my career. So much of this is out of my control. People will like it or they they won’t and it’s about trying to find some peace and asking myself, “Do I feel like I’ve done my best?” And how much that really matters, instead of being as validated by the praise one receives. We all long for that – I’d be lying if I said I didn’t, too. But I think there’s just a little bit less worry about that. It kind of feels like age gives you that.
What about your songwriting approach did you change for A Tip Toe High Wire?
I think songwriting is always such a journey. This was the first record that has been primarily made up of my touring band. Some of the songs were written and then performed live before we even recorded them in the studio – not all of them – but a good chunk of them have been road-tested, which is an interesting way of [developing a song]. “Lord, That’s a Long Way,” I wrote that tune because I literally was imagining in my mind the way it would feel to play this live with this band. It’s a different kind of approach when you’re thinking that way. I imagine one instrument kicking it off and then another one joining in on that same riff and kind of building the opening. In this way, sometimes you can almost hear it and feel it in a live experience before you’re even finished writing a song.
“Muddy Water” is a beautiful song with an equally beautiful sentiment about staying true to oneself. How does this mentality applies to your experience as an artist?
I think part of it is about trying to not become jaded by [the life of a musician]. If you’re doing something over and over and it kind of becomes your world, it’s easy to get burned out. I’m always trying to make sure that I don’t get burned out and am finding ways to be inspired. So much of that is about keeping a positive mindset and trying to keep an open mindset to the inspiration around us. The other thing that I’ll say is, I’ve gotten to do so much collaborating over the last few years. That’s been a big part of my musical world and I feel like it’s been really broad-reaching too, in ways that I’m inspired.
Stepping out on tour with Cory Wong – that’s a fun time. It’s way different than what I do, but it’s a fun time. Going to make music with Béla Fleck – that’s about really getting in the weeds and rehearsing and working hard on incredibly complex instrumental music. Getting to go join Sturgill Simpson on something, it’s about not over-rehearsing the songs and making sure there’s something about the freshness of maybe one or two takes in the recording studio. That’s why I love collaboration. Being part of something that’s not yours, but you’re kind of part of it so you’re getting to learn and grow and experience and have that excitement rub off on you.
Several of the songs on A Tip Toe High Wire – “Red Bird,” “Haven Hill,” “Spitfire,” “Lord, That’s a Long Way” – nod to the matriarchs of your family. How would you describe where and how music fit into their lives and shaped each of their relationships with you and how you remember them?
Music was part of everyday life. My whole family is very much rooted in the backwoods of Appalachia, the boonies of Tennessee, as far back as I know. Not a lot of money, no college degrees, but such smart, strong characters and people with a wealth of knowledge and grit and toughness and all that. I think music was a way that they were able to cope and have it be part of their way to pass the time. More a way of life than trying to dream of being a performer.
I remember my Granny singing when I was a kid, hearing her sing in church, and I know [my husband Justin Moses’s] family background was much the same. So certainly a different kind of musical experience. But music has always been a big part of both my family story and Justin’s family story. And I was lucky enough to get to know all of his grandparents – he’s since lost three of them – but I was lucky to get to know them and my grandparents too. Not everybody gets that. So I feel super lucky. And yeah, I think inevitably those stories kind of wind up weaving their way into my songwriting.
How do you balance so many different but interconnected objectives – especially finding space to let out parts of yourself through your music?
I’ve been able to say yes to a lot of things, because [I’ve chosen] to say no to some other things and that feels rewarding because normally I’d be stressing out. So trying to think ahead and find the balance as a human, asking, “How can I be focused in the moment, not stack too many things on top of each other, and instead carve out the balance where I do have time to write, I do have time to record, and I do have time to tour?” Because I love all those things. In a perfect world, you make them exist in a cohesive way and that can inform what the art becomes on the other side of it, because I’ve given myself space to enjoy all these things in their own way, instead of just the constant chaos of trying to do five things at once.
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