Tenille Arts Ended a 9-Year Romance and Started a Great Country Album
Tenille Arts named her new album Love, Heartbreak & Everything in Between because that's what she's been living. The "Somebody Like That" singer and Bachelor favorite admits it started with a difficult breakup.
But it wasn't a bad breakup.
"It was just, ‘I’m here and you don’t plan on coming here and I don’t plan on coming back,'" she tells Taste of Country. "The distance was the thing that kind of ended it.”
Arts and her boyfriend of nine years started dating when she was just a 15-year-old high school student in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, and she recognizes that he may not have signed up for everything she identifies as today: singer, songwriter, road warrior and (most importantly) Nashvillian.
Two songs from the new album (released Jan. 10) are word for word truths. "Another Life" and "Right Guy Wrong Time" are also the two songs fans seem to identify with.
"I used to buy you a T-shirt from everywhere I went, everywhere I went / Kind of like a postcard / I was sending you my heart," she sings to begin "Another Try," a piano ballad you write when you're wishing things ended differently.
“Those two songs are literally exactly — I didn’t hold back anything,” Arts says of a pair of melancholy cuts that ache more than they do attack. "It’s amazing to me how many people are like ‘That is exactly what I went through.’ And I’m like, ‘How?'"
Both songs (the 'heartbreak,' if you will) find Arts frozen in time, while several others find her falling in love, again. After the 'In Between' (best represented by "Somebody Like That") she found love again. "Wild Love" captures that feeling — a feeling she often struggles to put to paper out of fear that if she writes it, it will cease to be real.
"I wrote a lot of them like a week after meeting him," Arts tells Taste of Country Nights about the songs written about her current boyfriend. "I didn't tell him, but ... I wrote ('Wild Love') literally a week after our first date and I played it out or something like that and he's like 'Oh, I love that song.' And I was like, 'Funny story, it's about you.'"
Watch the full interview with Taste of Country Nights above. Love, Heartbreak & Everything in Between is Arts' second full album, although she has also released an EP. "Moment of Weakness" and "I Hate This" are the two previous singles she performed on The Bachelor, in 2018 and 2019.
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