In her song “Enabling,” Tenille Townes presents two partners in a showdown over the deplorable behavior of what we presume to be the guy, who’s “kicking gravel with (his) shoes…staring at the ground.” He’s gone on another bender and the narrator knows he’s about to apologize (disingenuously) and that she’s about to forgive him (reflexively).
“Here I go, saving the day again, And I know that’s what they call enabling,” she sings in the chorus. And with that seductive half rhyme, the songwriter takes us to an emotionally potent place that’s universally recognizable, painfully poignant, and beautifully sung.
The theme is further developed in the title track of Tenille’s newest album The Acrobat, a song about a woman who contorts herself to the needs of others until she doesn’t know who she is. This one’s a moving duet (and co-write) with Lori McKenna, the acclaimed Boston-area songwriter who’s elevated intimate domestic affairs into a literate and influential songwriting career. Townes, a 32-year-old Canadian with a rich history in Nashville’s country music business and a new indie outlook, has much in common with McKenna and is recommended to anyone who loves her work.
“I love Lori so much,” Townes says in Episode 362 of The String. “We've written lots of songs through the years, and she invited me up to Boston, and we got to write some of these songs together, and ‘The Acrobat’ was one of those. I felt like there was so much of this character that I related to, but I didn't even know it at the time. And I think the distance from that helped me sort of see that people-pleasing tendency that I was really struggling with at the time. The song knew before I did.”
Speaking of Acrobats, Townes has walked some tightropes in her years as an artist, hovering between commercial country and Americana, and between the United States music market and her native Canada, where she’s a certified star. After her first two albums for a small Canadian label, she got signed to the mighty Columbia Records’s Nashville division and made The Lemonade Stand, a critically-acclaimed album released in the disadvantageous month of June 2020. Even so, its two advance singles - “Somebody’s Daughter” and “Jersey On The Wall (I’m Just Asking)” topped the Canadian country charts and led to more than a half dozen Canadian Country Music Association Awards, plus a couple of ACM Awards in the states.
Her journey began when, in the small town of Grand Prairie, Alberta, she adopted a disused family guitar and got inspired to start shaping her diary entries as verses and choruses. By the end of high school she made a formal business pitch to her parents (complete with Powerpoint) that set the template for the two forces that steer her life - performance and philanthropy. Tenille held a fund-raising concert for a youth shelter in her home town that surprised her with its success (she’s continued to back them, to a total tune to date of $2 million). Then she took to the road life by playing middle and high schools across Canada, with a mission.
“It was called the Play It Forward Tour. We would recognize three kids at each school who were the ones who were just making a quiet difference,” she says. “And we'd have the school recognize these kids, and we'd tell their stories and sing them some songs. And I found sponsors to back the whole tour, so every school would get a little honorarium that that student would get to decide what it would go towards. And it turned out to be a really cool thing.”
When that worked out, and Canada began to acknowledge her talent and promise, she moved to Nashville in 2011. She landed a publishing deal with the savvy boutique firm Big Yellow Dog, followed by the nod from Columbia. Townes landed on Music Row just when bro country couldn’t have been bigger and thoughtful/profound songwriters, especially women, were being shown the hand by country radio. Yet Townes toured with folks like Miranda Lambert (a big supporter) and Lady A and built a sufficient audience that she was able to part ways with the label from a position of strength a couple of years ago. That didn’t however make it easy to know what to do next, save for writing songs.
“I initially was sitting down in my spare room, sitting next to my dog Sam, and was just trying to make a few guitar vocals to decide what songs were really speaking to me,” she says. “And I got like three or four songs in, and I was like, wait a second, what if I just made a record like this? And the whole thing was really healing.”
That’s what led to The Acrobat, a 9-song collection released in April of this year. On it you’ll hear an artist in transition, processing change she maybe didn’t want but needed, in a pure and vulnerable musical setting. A few sparkles were added to the bedroom tracks, including harmony vocals from I’m With Her on the prayerful and lovely “Grey Like Emmylou.” We hear that song in this hour as well as the melancholy yet self-assured closer “In Love With The Sky,” about the prices paid for chasing the musical life.
After you hear this conversation and the new acoustic songs, go take a spin through The Lemonade Stand and ask yourself what country music at large could do with that kind of heart and savvy production (in that case by the in-demand Jay Joyce). Townes didn’t get embraced by the country establishment and she hasn’t yet been given her fair hearing in Americana, but she’s happy with her Music Row experience and optimistic about what’s next.
“There is music on the fringe, and I think there always has been, and to be honest, those are the ones that push the genre in directions that aren't in the middle lane,” she says here. “And I think that's what kind of arcs the evolution of country music through history - the ones who were never afraid to be a little bit on the outside. And that's what I aspire to, just follow the music.”
