Ahead of her long-awaited return to the UK with The Living Room Tour, I sat down with Tenille Townes to talk about trusting instinct over expectation, learning to let go of perfection, and why the bravest leap she ever took wasn’t onto a stage, it was back towards herself.
Tenille Townes
Some records announce themselves with a bang. Others quietly settle beside you, revealing something new each time you return. The Acrobat is one of those records.
By the time I’d reached my second listen, I found myself noticing the silences as much as the songs themselves. The breaths between the lines. The moments where another instrument could have entered but never did. Rather than feeling unfinished, those spaces somehow became part of the conversation. It was as if Tenille Townes had trusted the listener enough to meet her halfway. That trust runs through every corner of the record.
Recorded largely alone on a single microphone in the spare room of her house, producing, mixing and playing every instrument herself, The Acrobat is easily the most intimate album of her career. Not because it’s small, but because it refuses to hide behind anything.
With The Living Room Tour bringing those songs back to UK audiences this autumn, I caught up with Townes to talk about independence, people pleasing, vulnerability, songwriting and why, after everything she’s achieved, she’s still learning to trust herself.
The land of second verses
Before we dive into the album, I can’t help asking about something she’s said before. Over the years, Townes has affectionately referred to British audiences as “the land of second verses.” It’s a phrase that perfectly captures something anyone who’s been to a country show in the UK will recognise. We don’t just sing the chorus, we know every word.
She smiles immediately. “I remember the very first time I came over there to play songs. I was so nervous and afraid because everyone was so quiet and just leaned in.”
That silence, she explains, quickly became one of her favourite things. “Every time I’ve come since, it’s just become one of my favourite things. They’re just so in the songs unlike anywhere else. It’s so special to me.”
She pauses before adding something that feels completely genuine. “It’s one of my favourite places to get to play music. I truly mean that.” It’s a fascinating contrast to North American audiences. Where American crowds often wear their emotions on their sleeves, UK audiences tend to absorb every lyric before giving anything back.
That intimacy has naturally found its way into her latest tour. “I wanted to bring pieces of home with me on the road and set up a place where everybody just feels safe to show up and be exactly who they are.”
The Living Room Tour isn’t simply named after the venues or the stripped-back arrangements. It’s designed to feel exactly as it sounds. “The shows are very conversational, really personal and vulnerable. Every show so far has been a little different. It could be request-driven, and it’s just kind of going off the feeling in the room.”
Listening to her describe it, you realise she isn’t trying to recreate a concert. She’s trying to create a conversation. And that feels like the perfect way to introduce The Acrobat. Taking the leap
Album titles can often feel like afterthoughts. Not this one. When I ask about The Acrobat, Townes admits that even she wasn’t sure she’d made the right choice at first. “I couldn’t decide what to name this album. I’d initially thought it was Acrobat, and then I went through this doubting phase.”
It took friends reminding her to trust her own instinct. Which, fittingly, became the entire point of the record. “The whole project of this album was trusting my intuition again.”
She leans forward slightly as she explains what the title really means. “To me, The Acrobat means a leap into the great unknown without a safety net.”
That leap wasn’t just creative. After years becoming accustomed to the machinery of the music industry, this record marks her return as an independent artist. “This represents the return to being an independent artist again… without this infrastructure of industry that I’d got used to for a lot of years.”
Tenille Townes
Yet instead of falling, she found herself caught by the people listening. “It’s been so incredibly encouraging feeling everybody listening out there being like these arms that are catching that new flight path.”
It’s a beautiful image and one that quietly underpins everything that follows. This isn’t an album about certainty. It’s an album about having the courage to jump anyway. The record that found her
One of the things that struck me most about The Acrobat is that it never feels like a collection of songs. It unfolds more like a diary, each track revealing another layer until the whole record feels complete. It made me wonder whether Townes had always intended to make an album, or whether these songs simply found each other over time.
As it turns out, it was the latter. “I think the music tricked me into making this record,” she laughs.
At the time, she wasn’t chasing another album. She was trying to find herself again. “I was kind of in a really low spot. I was not feeling like myself and I was struggling and kind of going, ‘I don’t know what to do next.'”
Instead of thinking about radio singles, streaming numbers or even making a full record, she stripped everything back to the simplest question she could ask herself. “What if I just made a few guitar vocals of songs I really love?”
Those early recordings weren’t supposed to become The Acrobat. They were simply an attempt to tune out the noise around her and reconnect with something she’d started to lose. “I decided I just wanted to tune out all the noise around me and get back to the truth underneath.”
Four or five songs later, something clicked. “I was like, ‘Hold on a second… what if I just made this record right here?'”
What followed couldn’t have been further removed from a traditional studio album. “I recorded all this on one microphone, sitting in the spare room at my house next to my dog.”
There’s something wonderfully unglamorous about that image. In an era where records can involve endless collaborators, expensive studios and months of revisions, one of country music’s most respected songwriters rediscovered herself with little more than a microphone, a guitar and a quiet room. For Townes, that simplicity became the point. “It was a really healing thing for me. My whole purpose in finishing this project was… to find my intuition again.”
Listening back to the album after hearing that, it’s almost impossible not to hear it. Every song feels less like a performance and more like an honest conversation she’s finally allowing herself to have.
Tenille Townes
Finding the heart of the record
Although the album flows seamlessly from beginning to end, I was curious whether there was one particular song that convinced her this wasn’t just a handful of acoustic recordings anymore. Without hesitation, she points to Enabling. “Once I got to Enabling, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is where we’ve got to start.'”
It’s a track that I’d already scribbled a star next to in my notebook before we’d even spoken. For me, it’s the emotional centre of the album, the point where everything suddenly makes sense.
When I tell her it’s my favourite song on the record, she smiles before admitting just how difficult it was to write. “Oh, that one hurt a lot. But it brought a lot of healing too.”
She explains that Enabling helped her understand what the album was becoming. “That song kind of made me see the vision for this record.”
The final piece didn’t arrive until much later. “The last song that I wrote for the album was We Could Use A Little More.”
By then, her perspective had shifted. The early songs wrestled with internal battles, self-doubt, identity and losing herself. But by the end of the writing process, she found herself looking outward. “I got to this perspective where I was like, I’m so overwhelmed by the noise of what’s going on in the world… and just feeling so hungry for the love that I think we’re all made of underneath everything.”
Only then did the puzzle finally feel complete. “Once that one found its place, I was like, ‘Okay, I think this is the whole thing now.'”
Tenille Townes
Learning to trust herself
One theme kept resurfacing throughout our conversation. Trust. Not trusting audiences. Not trusting critics. Trusting herself. Townes has spoken before about trying to move away from people pleasing, and I wondered how much that had shaped both the writing and the production of The Acrobat. She doesn’t pretend she’s mastered it. “It’s a constant practice. It’s a new practice.”
Instead, this album became an exercise in making decisions without looking over her shoulder for approval. “There was no one else around to be like, ‘Do you like this? What do you think?'”
Every tiny production choice became another opportunity to listen to her own instincts. “I literally was like, ‘Do I want more bass in this? Do I think there should be a harmony part? Yeah… I think I like that. Okay, cool. Let’s just go with that.'”
It sounds simple. In reality, it’s probably one of the hardest things any artist can do. “Every kind of small decision in this process really helped strengthen my ability to not need somebody else’s thumbs up for it.”
She pauses before quietly adding something that perhaps sums up the entire album better than anything else she’s said all afternoon. “I was just like, ‘No… I like this. And I want to share this like this.'”
It’s only a short sentence. But after everything she’d described about losing herself, it feels enormous.
The beauty of imperfection
Going into the interview, there was one observation I knew I wanted to ask about. Listening to The Acrobat, I found myself noticing the silence almost as much as the lyrics. The breaths. The pauses. The tiny imperfections most producers would instinctively polish away. Instead, Townes leaves them exactly where they are. When I mention it, she nods immediately. “I kept thinking, ‘What’s the truest feeling of this?'”
Sometimes that meant resisting the temptation to add another instrument or another layer. “It just needed to be live. I needed to just hold the guitar and sing it.” Ironically, she believes not knowing every studio trick protected the honesty of the record. “My limitations as a recording engineer helped keep the vulnerability intact.”
She laughs. “I don’t know how to tune a vocal.”
Rather than seeing that as a weakness, she embraces it. “There are some imperfections on there… and I think that’s even the way you can hear some of the breath in between or the quiet parts. That was just me sitting here playing it.” As she says it, I’m reminded why this record connected with me so quickly.
In a world where so much music is polished until every rough edge disappears, The Acrobat does the opposite. It leaves enough space for you to hear the person behind the songs. And somehow, that makes every lyric land even harder.
Tea with Emmylou
Every artist has a north star. Sometimes it’s another songwriter. Sometimes it’s a record that changed everything. Sometimes it’s a conversation that arrives exactly when it’s needed. For Tenille Townes, one of those moments came over tea with Emmylou Harris.
We’d been talking about trusting instinct, about letting go of perfection and about the courage it took to make The Acrobat on her own, when our conversation naturally drifted towards one of the album’s most affecting songs, Grey Like Emmylou. Rather than being a tribute to a musical hero, it’s a song about permission. Permission to stop chasing certainty. Permission to sit with life’s contradictions.
“She’s just one of those people who’s always reminded me that life doesn’t have to be black and white,” Townes says. “There are so many beautiful shades in between.”
That idea sits quietly beneath much of The Acrobat. The songs rarely offer neat resolutions. Instead, they make peace with uncertainty. Townes explains that one of the things she’s always admired about Harris is her ability to make people feel seen without pretending to have all the answers. “She’s always just encouraged curiosity.”
It’s a word that comes up several times during our conversation. Curiosity, not certainty or perfection. Just remaining open enough to keep learning. That mindset also shaped the people she turned to while making the record. Songwriters like Lori McKenna have long been heroes of hers, not because they write clever lyrics, but because they write honest ones. “I’ve learned so much from watching people like Lori,” she tells me. “She just tells the truth.”
It’s a deceptively simple observation. The older I get, the more I realise truth is often the hardest thing to write. Not because we don’t know it. Because we’re frightened someone else might.
Vulnerability never gets easier
If there’s one misconception people have about artists who write deeply personal songs, it’s that they somehow become immune to sharing them. That after enough albums, enough interviews and enough tours, vulnerability simply becomes part of the job. Townes smiles knowingly when I suggest it. “No.” She laughs. “It never gets easier.”
Instead, she describes vulnerability almost like returning to the edge of a diving board. Every song. Every show. Every night. “Every time you share something that matters to you, you’re taking a risk.”
That risk doesn’t disappear simply because audiences respond warmly. If anything, it becomes more significant. “You hope somebody else finds themselves in it.”
Perhaps that’s why her shows have become as conversational as they are musical. Rather than presenting polished performances, she invites audiences into the stories behind them. Listening to her talk about those moments, I begin to understand why UK audiences have embraced her so completely. It’s not simply because of the songs. It’s because she creates space for people to recognise pieces of themselves inside them. Throughout our conversation, she repeatedly returns to one simple belief. “Music has always made me feel less alone.”
It’s such an uncomplicated sentence. Yet it might explain her entire career. Whether she’s writing about heartbreak, hope, self-doubt or healing, the destination is always the same. Connection.
Tenille Townes
Standing in the circle
There are few stages more symbolic in country music than the Grand Ole Opry. For many artists, stepping into that famous circle represents arrival. For Townes, it still represents responsibility. She lights up when we talk about performing there. “It’s still one of my favourite places in the world.”
Despite everything she’s achieved, the awards, the international tours, the recognition, there’s still a sense of disbelief in her voice. “You never really get used to it.”
She speaks about the Opry less as an institution and more as a living history of country music. A place where every artist briefly becomes part of something much bigger than themselves. “You think about everybody who’s stood in that circle before you.”
Rather than creating pressure, she says it creates gratitude. “It’s just such an honour.”
Listening to her, it becomes clear that gratitude isn’t something she switches on for interviews. It’s simply how she sees the world. Whether she’s talking about audiences singing second verses in Britain, recording songs beside her dog or stepping onto the Opry stage, she speaks with the same quiet appreciation. Nothing feels taken for granted.
A work in progress
As our conversation begins to draw to a close, I find myself coming back to something that’s lingered throughout the afternoon. The Acrobat feels like a record about becoming comfortable with not having everything figured out. So, I ask her what she hopes people take away from it. She thinks for a moment before answering. “I hope people feel less alone.”
It’s striking because, after nearly an hour talking about songwriting, production, independence and creativity, her answer has nothing to do with music. Instead, it’s about people. “I hope somebody hears one of these songs and feels understood.”
It’s a sentiment that echoes through every story she’s shared. Whether discussing people pleasing, trusting her intuition or learning to leave imperfections untouched, the destination has never been self-expression for its own sake. It’s empathy. If her songs help someone feel seen, even briefly, then they’ve done their job.
Before we finish, I ask one final question. After everything she’s learned while making this record, does she feel she’s found the balance the acrobat spends the album searching for?
She smiles. “I don’t think you ever arrive.”
Instead, she sees life much as she sees songwriting. Always changing. Always teaching. Always inviting another leap. “I think we’re all just practising.”
Catching the leap
When our call ends, I find myself thinking back to something she said much earlier. Making The Acrobat meant stepping into the unknown without a safety net. For many artists, that image might sound terrifying. Listening to Tenille Townes, it sounds strangely hopeful. Because this isn’t an album about fearless people.
It’s an album about frightened people who jump anyway. About trusting yourself when certainty isn’t available. About accepting that imperfections might be the very things that allow somebody else to recognise themselves inside your story. There’s a quiet confidence running through The Acrobat. Not the confidence of someone who’s found every answer, but of someone who’s finally stopped pretending they need to.
In an industry that often rewards bigger, louder and shinier, Tenille Townes has made something refreshingly different. A record that whispers. A record that breathes. A record that trusts you enough to lean in. And if British audiences truly are the land of second verses, I have a feeling they’ll know every word long before this tour is over.
Tenille Townes released her album The Acrobat on 10th April 2026, and is bringing her Living Room Tour to the UK this autumn.
Tenille Townes
Interview with Tenille Townes by Henry Finnegan on 22nd July 2026. Instagram: @finneganfoto | Facebook: @finneganfoto.
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