By: Bridget Sinden
Canadian country singer/songwriter Tenille Townes released her latest single “Enabling” on January 16th as an independent artist. The song is a powerful and poignant track about realizing the boundary between compassion and accountability. Her lyricism, as always, is raw and integral, proving yet again that she’s one of country’s current best storytellers. She’s about to embark on “The living room tour” where she’ll be playing intimate acoustic shows across Canada and the US this spring.
We got the opportunity to sit down with Tenille and ask her about what this tour means to her and the experience she aims to create for fans saying, “I love being on the road…this tour my dream was to strip it all back and go back to the way I started creating music. Just holding a guitar in my hands and telling stories, my whole goal any time I come together with live music, is to make sure that everybody who walks through the door feels like they can just show up and be exactly who they are, feel whatever they want to feel, and know that they’re not alone in it.”
Tenille adds that one of her favourite parts of live music is the camaraderie of coming together and listening to a song in a room full of people living different experiences, “There’s a different movie playing in everyone’s head…but the feeling is the same, and that common thread to me is so powerful, and I really wanted this tour to be anchored around that thread…I’m really excited to be together with everybody in these rooms”
“Enabling” as a song, encapsulates the mission of “The living room tour” with its natural production, and its one Tenille shares she’s particularly excited to play live for the first time. “Its been really special hearing people share stories, it takes a lot of courage to talk about hard things, like the struggle that comes with being a people pleaser…or just wanting to love and help someone so much, and there comes a certain point weather its addiction or whatever that might be, you can’t really love and help someone who isn’t willing to do that for themselves.”
Tenille goes on to say in summary that, “There’s a point where you kind of have to exhale and put up a boundary, and that is like the hardest thing to do… that’s why I wrote this song.”
To Tenille, being an independent is “a beautiful winding road of an adventure.” Saying that walking away from a label brought her a return to the “feisty spirit” she had when she first came to Nashville. Although it took a while to get to where she is now, telling “In the couple of years of that transition, all of the fear and sort of this feeling of failure I was working through, I kept creating in that time and I’m really grateful that I did because it helped me find my voice again, my own creative autonomy…and I’m starting to feel the liberating side of that…I’m feeling a return to self and I don’t think I would’ve created the music I’m making now if I hadn’t gone through that.”
This is just the start of this new era for Tenille, with a new record set to be announced soon. But she hopes this first release empowers fans to “return to their own center too” going on to say “To know that they’re not alone in what it feels like to let things go…I hope that this music maybe could give someone the courage to know that what is meant for them isn’t going to leave them behind.”
The living room tour kicks off on March 18th in Richmond Hill, Ontario, she is joined on the road by is Terra Lightfoot, Corina and Chris Buck Band. Although Tenille’s journey as an independent artist she says, is a bit of a “solo mission” she feels the “furthest thing from alone.”
Stay wild, stay authentic, stay country
