TENILLE TOWNES DROPS NEW EP, “TRAIN TRACK WORKTAPES” (AUDIO & VIDEO)
HOME TO ME
“Hey it’s Tenille Townes and this is my song Home To Me.”
“Home To Me was the very first song that I wrote on this train. And I’d picked up my guitar and I was just, we’d played maybe a total of six or seven shows at this point. And I was sitting there going, I feel so at home out here on this experience, like there’s just a part of my soul that just feels like being in this and I love that feeling. And I was like, I really don’t think we as a society, we put this idea of home like it fits into a couple of walls and a roof or something and I think it’s so much bigger than that. I think home is a feeling it’s just this feeling like you’re aligning with who you really are and maybe your purpose and this sense of community like that’s what home is to me.“
“Hey it’s Tenille Townes and that was my song Home To Me.”
KEEP LEAVING PIECES OF MY HEART
“Hey it’s Tenille Townes and this is my song Keep Leaving Pieces of My Heart.”
“I grew up being told, like work hard in school, and then you can go to college and do anything you want to do. If you work really hard, you can become a doctor or a lawyer, you could do all these things and then you know, you’ll raise your family and like live down the street from your parents and grow up and have this whole life and it’s like, I got to the end of high school I was just like, this isn’t enough for me like that is not what I’m feeling my soul being called to. There’s something different I have to chase I have to, I have to I can’t not. And so that’s what that fiery feeling of like I have to find out what’s out there is what put me in a vehicle right after high school hitting the road and spending 32 weeks in a motorhome playing for middle schools and high schools. And then I got in my Tacoma truck and I drove 45 hours to move to Nashville and like, I’ve just always had this love for traveling and wandering around. And so Keep Leaving Pieces of My Heart very much just felt like me sitting in this moment of like, wow, I really kind of turned that picture of things upside down. And I know I’m not the only one. There’s so many people in the world who just have to follow that feeling of calling whatever it might look like and it’s kind of a brave and terrifying thing to do, but I wouldn’t trade one second of it.”
“Hey it’s Tenille Townes and that was my song Keep Leaving Pieces of My Heart.”
LANDSLIDE
“Hey it’s Tenille Townes and this is my song Landslide.”
“So it was really intentional for me to do Landslide in one pass from top to bottom. I mean, the intention on this whole project was not to have anything perfect it was just to have everything feel real and like we were caught in this moment of riding down the train tracks. So I wanted landslide to just feel like a moment like I was just sitting there playing through it, which is exactly what was happening.“
“Hey it’s Tenille Townes and that was my song Landslide.”
COMING TOGETHER
“Hey it’s Tenille Townes and this is my song Coming Together.”
“You could just feel in these towns especially in the small towns that there was just something magical about the way they literally were coming together. And I had the front row seat to be taking in the expressions on their faces and like their smiles were real, you know, and like we had these moments together with each other and from the kids to the grandmas, it just was like everybody was leaned in, in a really special way and in the small towns, you could feel that even more so prominently. And that’s something I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life. But that was very much at the heart of the inspiration behind Coming Together. I was like wow, this is pretty pretty special to witness this and it is the kind of light that just you can feel that like glowing in the middle of nowhere and it just it carries it’s got this reach to it and we literally got to witness that moving from little town to little town in such a unique way. It’s different than taking a trip on a highway or, you know, flying over overtop of it. We were on literally the tracks less traveled running on a train from small town to small town.“
“Hey it’s Tenille Townes and that was my song Coming Together.”
“Hey it’s Tenille Townes and this is my song Wheels.”
“Wheels is so honest to me that it’s very scary because it’s the hardest part of the road, which is coming off of the high and wishing that you could just stay in it always. To me, I started writing the lyrics for this in my journal more so kinda like just a poem to start with. And like four days into the trip, I could feel myself in this elevated state like I was floating like I was so high on the shared experience of the shows on the momentum and the motion and I was already like, it’s like I was standing really high up somewhere looking down going like wow, this is really going to hurt to come down like I can already- I was dreading the stopping of the train while I was in the middle of the experience, which I hate. It’s like you miss out on it because you’re going this is going to come to an end and never wanting to come off that high which is exactly how I very truly honestly feel.“
“Hey it’s Tenille Townes and that was my song Wheels.”