Hotstar: Tenille Townes – Big Heart For Big Kids And Big Fans

Reid Long – Tenille Townes
rocking Houston’s Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion on the Bandwagon Tour with Miranda Lambert, Little Big Town and The Steel Woods in Aug. 10, 2018.

When 9-year-old Tenille Townes was brought onstage to sing with Shania Twain, the Diamond Award certified superstar almost didn’t get the stage back. 

Laughing after the girl took a solo chorus, then went into “Honey, I’m Home,” Twain said to the bespangled cowgirl, “You don’t seem like you need a parent, but I think I should turn you over to one.”

In that moment, the young power alto’s life was determined. 

She would sing anywhere they would let her: national anthems, local events, clubs her parents drove her to, “standing in the back, cheering me on.”

Hearing promoter Ken Truen talking about an upcoming music festival on a Grand Prairie, Alberta, country station, Townes found his number, called him up cold – and suggested he needed her to sing the anthem. 

Nothing came of the call, but after hearing her sing at a local hockey game, he agreed. The next year, she had her own set. The 12-year old wasn’t looking back.

She started a charity called Big Hearts for Big Kids at 15, when she found out the youth shelter in her hometown was going to close. 

She raised $30,000 through what started as a backyard benefit concert that year. Today, the Big Hearts tally is $1.5 million raised for the Sunrise House Youth Emergency Shelter. She wanted to tour instead of go to college, so she made a plan to show her father, who embraced Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” philosophy of 10,000 hours. 

After five weeks proving a Winnebego tour of the region’s middle and high schools – using fifth graders for roadies, gas station and grocery store sponsorships for food and fuel – could work, he agreed to let her spend the 32 weeks of “freshman year” covering the rest of Canada. Nominated for Female Artist of the Year at the Canadian Country Music Awards at 17, she was given their Humanitarian of the Year Award at 18. 

Never one to shy away from a challenge, or a person in need, Townes was already crossing the border to Nashville, writing songs and making inroads into the American record business. 

She jokes about the gravity of her dream, “Just a short 45-hour drive with my suitcase – and that’s when it hit me that this is a really long drive.”

It wasn’t long until she had a publishing deal, followed by a record deal, followed by management. As Shopkeeper Management’s Crystal Dishmon explained of the young woman who merges an emotional transparency with performing fervor that echoes Melissa Etheridge emerging, “She has this way of breaking your heart, while rocking you with the intensity that she feels in the lyrics. 

“You watch her sling the guitar around as if she were born with it in her hands, yet she has these impactful songs and this fiery intensity for delivering them.”

“Somebody’s Daughter,” currently at country radio, is an impassioned look at a girl panhandling on the side of the road. “Jersey On The Wall” captures a radiant high school girl killed in a wreck. Both offer empathy, as well as a slightly deeper tug at how we face the world – and remind us what we’re all capable of.

Having opened Lambert’s Bandwagon Tour with Little Big Town last summer, Townes was tapped for Dierks Bentley’s 2019 Burning Man Tour from January to September. Beyond her dates on Lambert’s tour, she will open shows on Maren Morris’ fall tour, play one-offs with artists like Patty Griffin and continue working in the United Kingdom and Australia.

“Last year, we released Living Room Worktapes,” Dishmon explains, “to showcase who she is, strategically releasing songs that paint all sides of who she is as an artist. We’re doing the same thing with touring. Equally at home onstage with nothing but an acoustic and her voice as she is with a full band, she can rock an arena.” Living Room Worktapes is Townes unadorned: a massive voice with just a deep acoustic strum. She meets her songs head on, offers a wisdom far beyond her 25 years. She cites her grandparents feeding “pretty much anyone who came to the house,” and in that spirit, her activism was born – and her compassion rose.

If big mainstream recording artists try to save it all for their polished major label projects, Townes isn’t worried about orthodoxy. This is, after all, the girl who eschewed college to spend 10,000 hours learning to color code the gear so anyone could load it, how to create a harmonious travel experience for a band, the way to engage young people in their dreams through her two, three gigs a day trek across Canada.

“The stories kids told me, the dreams,” the tiny musicians marvels. “Seeing me made them feel like it was okay. Even now when I play, I go out after and sign shirts, talk to people. They can tell I understand – and I want to hear them.”

More than anything, Townes wants people to understand the humanity these songs come from, to feel the ache, the lonely, the hollow these characters experience – and know they’re not alone.

“I want to make people feel understood and encouraged,” Townes says. “I’d heard Patty Griffin songs, and Lori McKenna songs, and know what they did to me. I want to pass that forward. Music is the gathering place for people, and you’re alive in a different way. The possibility of what one person out there might need, something you don’t see, but they hear something that helps? That’s the best part of this dream.”