Tenille Arts joins Kelleigh Bannen on Today’s Country Radio for an interview to talk all about her new album ‘Girl to Girl.’ They chat about a song—”Growing Old Young”—that Kelleigh feels has Song of the Year potential, as well as what it was like to work with producer Nathan Chapman, who produced Taylor Swift’s hit album ‘Fearless.’ Tune in and listen to the interview with Tenille Arts in-full today at 11am PT / 1pm CT / 2pm ET or anytime on-demand here.
Tenille Arts on “Growing Old Young”
I think there are so many things in our lives that make us feel like we had to grow up a little too fast and whether that’s being bullied at school, just not accepting yourself, trouble at home with your parents or addiction, substance abuse. It’s like all of those things… I’m like, “These are things that go on in the everyday home that people never touch on in country music.” It’s like this thing. And I say in the song, like sweep it under the carpet. That’s what everybody does all the time. And I’ve seen my parents’ generation do that. That was kind of a thing. It was just we don’t want to talk about it. We don’t want to talk about mental health. We don’t want to go there because that’s too deep for an everyday conversation. But I think everybody, just even over the last year on social media, people have been opening up, sharing what they’ve been through. And to me until I started to do that myself, I thought I’m so alone. I don’t want to put this out there because I don’t think anybody has been through what I’ve been through. And the second I started talking about things and opening up about anxiety and all of these things, it was like, “Everybody I know has been through the same things and it immediately makes you feel less alone.” And it makes you feel like you can go on about your day and not feel like you’ve got this big secret or this big burden on your heart and weight on your shoulders. You can open up and share things with people and especially writing this song with two men. That was, to me, the most surprising thing was that these guys wanted to sit in this room and open up about that. Like what an incredible just nod to just telling men to open up.
Tenille Arts on Following Up Her No. 1 Debut Single “Somebody Like That” with Her Second Single, “Back Then, Right Now”
It definitely feels different. It feels like there’s a lot of pressure on the second song that you put out after a big song like that. And for me, I was like, “I didn’t know what that song was going to be.” This was one of the last songs that was written for the record. And I just remember being like… I had been actually sent the song. I was sent like pretty much a finished song and I loved the chorus, but I wanted to go back in and make those verses really my own. And so, I went back into the writing room and I was like, “This is the most perfect song for where we are right now because everybody just wants to get back to simpler times.” You know? And for me, even in the second verse, we mentioned my little yellow Pontiac and that was the car that I drove around my hometown and drove all the way to Nashville and still drove up until like a couple of months ago.
Tenille Arts on Learning from Producer Nathan Chapman
Nathan is incredible. I’ve obviously looked up to him and he did that incredible Taylor [Swift] album [‘Fearless’]. And when we went into record, I was like “A lot of these songs that I wanted him to work on felt like some of that early Taylor stuff.” And so I was like, “I think he’s going to be the perfect fit for this.” We were actually in the studio and in the vocal booth that she recorded all that stuff with Nathan. So it was really cool just to grow up, watching Taylor take off and knowing like this guy was… Both of them were so unknown and they both just took a chance on each other. And I think that’s such a beautiful relationship and Nathan doesn’t just work with anybody. So I just felt very blessed that he was like, “I love these songs. I want to work on this.” And we pretty much did all of the vocals that day. Like I didn’t go back in and re-sing anything. He was so great. It was the first time that somebody had said to me, “Sing the verses like you’re just telling a story. Don’t worry about being perfect. Just like sing the verses like you’re telling the story. When you get to the chorus, sing like you’re a singer.”
Tenille Arts on ‘Girl to Girl,’ the Album and the Song
All of the songs on this record were like, I wanted to write them… I felt like I was writing songs that I wish I had when I was 15, 16 years old, going through those things. And ‘Girl To Girl,’ being the title of the album is more about like the letter to my younger self, the letter to the fans, the letter to everybody. And this specific song is more like, “Girl, don’t go there. I’ve been there, done that. It’s going to hurt.” And you never want to hear that advice from like your parents. They can preach all day long about how high school was just high school. But when you’re in that moment and you are walking those halls, you feel like it’s everything. No matter what people tell you, you feel like it’s everything. And so I wanted to write this album from a point of view where I’m like, “I want to be your big sister and tell you, hey, for real, this is just high school. I’ve been there, done that.”
