Tenille Townes, who brings The Storytelling Tour to House of Blues Cambridge Room Friday night, is looking back and looking forward on her latest stretch of shows.
The 32-year-old named the tour in honor of her debut EP, Living Room Worktapes, a collection of acoustic demos she released with in 2018. It’s also a nod to revisiting the simple way she began making music and her brand new independent album, The Acrobat, a stripped-down, nine-track record she released last month.
“My initial goal was to sit down and make some guitar/vocals to be able to decide what songs to take to the studio,” says Townes in a recent Zoom interview.
“I was like, ‘I think I like these like this. What if I just made the record super sparse and intimate? Kinda like I’m just playing it live.’ And it brought a lot of healing on its way; just this return to self.”
Townes burst onto the music scene with her breakthrough debut single, “Somebody’s Daughter,” which went to number one on the Canadian Country Chart.
The track showcased her storytelling talent and ability to unpack the human experience, both from a distance and up close.
“It came from a drive I took with my mom. We were going furniture shopping, and we saw this young girl standing on the side of the interstate holding onto a cardboard sign. It was just kind of one of those moments, where you’re like, ‘What happened in her life?’ I just couldn’t quit thinking about this girl that was probably close to my age.”
Townes describes writing as her way of trying to understand things happening to, around, and within her.
“We watched the guy at the red light in the truck in front of us. He had some Gatorade in the back cooler of his construction truck. So, he got out and he gave her some,” continues Townes. “We watched this beautiful moment of kindness, and the light turned green, and we carried on our way, but I just, I couldn’t quit thinking about it.”
This observational storytelling cuts through in “she plays the piano,” a standout track on Townes’ latest full-length, written about a woman in her great grandmother’s dementia ward she visited back when she was in middle school.
“We’d go visit her for lunch, often, and we’d sit in the cafeteria. There was another patient on the same floor as her that was this sweet woman, who could not tell us her name at all, and had no idea where she was, but they put this keyboard up in the cafeteria for her. And she would sit at this table, and she would play this polka like it was nobody’s business,” recalls Townes.
“It was amazing. And she’d turn around and look at us after she was done, and we’d all cheer. It was like she’d just played Carnegie Hall. And she’d turn around and face the keyboard again. She’d just start the song over from the top. And that was lunch hour. It was just this polka from this sweet woman. I remember watching that, and just being like, ‘how crazy is it that music can remember the essence of who we are, even when we don’t?’”.
Character-based storytelling is also present on the title track.
She recorded ‘the acrobat’ with her songwriting hero, Lori McKenna, who she and her father watched play The Bluebird her very first night in Nashville after making the 47-hour drive from Alberta.
Townes is holding this full-circle moment close to her chest.
“I just sat there, so inspired by her and enamored and went back and studied so much of her writing. And since then, through the years, I’ve had the opportunity to write with her, and she’s become a friend and mentor,” shares Townes. “It only felt fitting in this song to see if she’d come and sing it with me. And she comes in on the line that talks about the fortune teller, like she’s this voice of wisdom. That feels so real.”
Real is an underlying theme for the tone of Townes’ songwriting.
“It helped to be able to put it into a character, and at the same time, it is very personal, so I’m excited,” shares Townes. “This song kind of felt like a good thematic anchor. Also, just a metaphor for taking the leap into this new independent era and feeling this community of people being the arms that are catching this jump into the unknown.”
Townes is rewarding her loyal fanbase with a different setlist each night of tour, granting crowd requests.
“I want it to be a place where anyone who walks through the door feels safe to just show up and be loved and accepted as who they are,” says Townes. “It’s that tangible thing, where everyone in the room has a different movie playing in their head of what a song makes them think about… but the feeling, that emotional undercurrent, is the same thing. And we’re all kind of holding onto it at one time. Live music is, I think, a unique experience for people to notice that. That’s what I’m always hungry to get back on the road to experience, is everyone in the room feeling the same way for a second.”
Townes loves bringing her band on the road and rocking out, but she is treasuring the intimacy of the softer way she is presenting her storytelling with The Living Room Tour. The atmosphere allows for more backstory, as well.
“It’s the dream to be able to tell stories and travel around and play them for people. Any way to keep picking away at that is part of the motivation.”
Another thematic centerpiece on the record is the lead single, “enabling.”
“There was a lot of themes of breaking out of some people-pleasing habits that I’ve struggled with in my life. Of, just being like, ‘Wait. What is a boundary, and how does one do that?’ This song came from a person that I loved coming up to me in a parking lot with an attempted apology. And I could hear myself being like, ‘It’s okay; don’t worry about it,’ like I say a million times over and over,” recalls Townes.
“You know when you have like an out-of-body experience, where you almost float over yourself and you’re watching it happen? And I was like, ‘Wait, what are you doing?’ I came back to write about it, and that kind of woke me up to the pattern a little more and helped me see it a different way.”
Townes shares her conclusion that if love means losing pieces of yourself, it isn’t love at all.
“‘enabling’ was definitely the start to that season of writing from this really raw place. Where I was like, ‘Okay. This is something really different,’” says Townes. “That song was at the start of the emotional journey for me. And then, the rest of the record kind of unfolded from that place and that incident.”