How Tenille Arts Became the Bachelor’s Favorite Singer
Tenille Arts talked to Taste of Country Nights prior to appearing on The Bachelor. Watch her talk about the show, her new single and her current relationship status at 7PM CT on Jan. 6.
Tenille Arts' Monday night (Jan. 6) appearance on The Bachelor will be her third in three years. No other singer has performed on the show more than once, so it's fair to ask: What the heck?
The "Somebody Like That" singer's opportunity is a story of persistence and talent more than luck and good fortune. She knew somebody who knew somebody and they collectively leaned into the perfect fit.
"My manager had been sending my music to one of the producers over there for a couple of years before the actual first time I was on the show," Arts tells Taste of Country. "A couple of the songs kind of sounded like I had written them for the show. They were very love-specific, like meeting somebody and letting your walls down and everything. The first time I was on the show, they just loved one of the songs that I sent in."
That song was "Moment of Weakness," and Arts says the performance brought massive attention to her and her music and started an expansion of her audience from just teens and 20-somethings to anyone 21 to 40. It reached millions of fans during a 2018 airing, despite being a pretty low-key acoustic performance.
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"The producer just fell in love with my music," Arts says. In fact, they told her to pick up the phone if she was releasing anything new that would fit the show. So she did, and in January 2019 she performed "I Hate This" for bachelor Colton Underwood. She'd just released the song to radio and within four days she'd rack up millions of streams. A recording contract with Reviver Records (Big & Rich, David Lee Murphy) followed.
"They're like, 'We wanna keep supporting you until this thing blows up and until everybody knows your music,'" Arts says. So, as Arts was preparing to release her new Love, Heartbreak & Everything in Between album (Jan. 10), she reached out again, and again the producers of the ABC show liked the synergy.
During the 2020 season premiere she'll perform "Somebody Like That" for bachelor Peter Weber. She tells Taste of Country Nights that this song stopped a pattern of writing nothing but breakup songs after a bad breakup.
"We were just talking about relationships that we looked up to," Arts says, "and for me that was my parents and my grandparents. We were just talking about ... dating is very different now. I kind of wanted something old school, like, get to know that person. Not over the phone, not texting. Get back to the way that people used to meet and how people used to date."
Did it work? Arts opens up about her personal love life and if she'd ever appear as a contestant on the ABC show during the full ToC Nights LIVE interview, scheduled to premiere at 7PM CT on Monday. Click Set Reminder so you don't miss it.
The 2020 season premiere of The Bachelor is a three-hour event beginning on ABC at 8PM ET on Monday (Jan. 6).
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