Tenille Townes Completed 'Train Track Worktapes' Entirely on Real Train: 'My Ultimate Paradise' (Exclusive)
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The country star talks exclusively with PEOPLE about her latest five-track collection of songs that she made while on the road, or as she says, “out on the tracks”
Tenille Townes has always loved trains — and what's more — she's always loved being in motion.
It was only a matter of time before the "Somebody's Daughter" singer, 29, who hails from Alberta, Canada, climbed aboard one of the locomotives to mash together her two greatest joys: moving and music.
The result? A five-track record full of songs, aptly titled Train Track Worktapes, out Friday.
"I think it was day three that I sat down and wrote the very first song, 'Home to Me.' We played the first show, and I just saw all these people gathered around in freezing cold weather, bringing donations for their local food bank. And just having that front-row seat to witness the generosity and resilience of the human spirit, it was so inspiring to me, and I couldn't help but write about it," Townes tells PEOPLE exclusively.
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The charity train tour, which covered 3,000 miles across southern Canada with 65 shows over 15 days, kept Townes and her band busy — but that didn't stop her from forging on with the relentless idea she had for the side project.
"Honestly, my voice really struggled to keep up with the tour because we were doing sometimes up to six or seven shows a day," she explains. "And so it probably wasn't the smartest thing for me to be spending time writing and recording songs on top of trying to make it through all the shows."
Still, Townes details the inevitable pull she felt, stating, "I couldn't help it. I just felt so inspired; I had to write about it."
Nowadays, Townes is based in Nashville, Tennessee, which is "just a short 45-hour drive away" from Grand Prairie, Alberta, Canada, where she grew up. The concept of home, which has always fascinated Townes, holds a big thematic role on Train Track Worktapes.
"Motion is my favorite thing. I love being on the road. I would be out every day if I could. It's my favorite high. And so this train tour was my ultimate paradise," Townes says. "But I think the human condition is to always be searching for home. And the more that I think about it and the more that I just experience this really crazy and wonderful journey of being able to travel to all these different places to play music, home to me is so much more of a feeling than a place."
For Townes, that feeling of home takes many different forms, including spending time singing the same song with an audience on one side of the world, as well as sitting at any town's little local coffee shop, or even getting to have a conversation with a new friend that she meets at an airport gate.
"Those kinds of moments — where you feel at home in yourself — are because you're comforted by the experiences that you're surrounded by. It's like your spirit knows you're right where you should be. And that's my favorite thing about music in general. It kind of brings you this feeling of home," she says. "Music is a bit of a traveler."
In fact, Townes credits one of her greatest musical influences for helping her conceptualize that notion.
"One of my favorite examples to think of is hearing Dolly Parton sing about 'Tennessee Mountain Home.' And it's like everything she's singing and the way the melody feels like, she could be talking about my home in northern Alberta in Canada and the way that it felt growing up there."
And it would seem that as much as Townes loves the road, the road loves her right back. She's currently preparing to head out on tour this summer with none other than Shania Twain — an experience that she calls the definition of full circle.
"I was a huge diehard Shania Twain fan — she's my ultimate hero. And I made a sign that said, 'Shania, can I please sing with you?' and got tickets as a gift to go to her concert and had my mom glue gun me a costume to look like her Miami concert DVD I'd watched a million times," Townes explains.
"I held the sign and was just singing my whole soul out to every song in her show. And three-quarters of the way through the show, she came around and reached out her hand and pulled me up on stage as a 9-year-old kid in front of 18,000 people. And I just stood up there next to my hero and was like, 'This is it. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.' "
Twain, 57, has since heard this story. "What do you say to someone who's had such a huge impact on your life like that? But I think I got 'thank you' out. And we got a new picture together, which is really cool," Townes says of the moment she showed Twain the years-old photo at an awards show.
Looking ahead, Townes hopes she can be that inspiration for subsequent generations. "I hope to get to pay that feeling forward to the next little dreamers. That moment was definitely a pretty significant, 'Yeah, this is it' feeling," she says.
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Townes also tells PEOPLE that she knew that with two of the Train Track Worktapes songs already written, she had to at least try and record them on an actual train.
"We borrowed and stole a bunch of gear from the stage car that we were playing all the shows on, and we would grab a couple mics and stands. And my drummer, Asa, used his suitcase for the kick drum, and he made shakers out of cereal bowls and tinfoil from the kitchen, and he played triangle on his mug that he was drinking his tea out of," she recalls. "We definitely had to get resourceful, and we just used what we had."
That spirit of creativity and desire to keep the music organic also led Townes to embrace the native sounds of her experience on the train and incorporate those sounds into the songs.
"I really wanted that to be a part of the fabric of what somebody listening could hear: the rattle of the tracks and the engine, the whistle and the hum of everything," she says. "My main goal was to go, 'How can we capture the time like a time machine of this adventure?' "
So Townes' wish for this labor of love project is simple, really — she wants others to join in on the "remarkable" experience she had out on the tracks.
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Never one to say no to music in motion, she notes: "I hope that they feel like they're part of the ride."
Train Track Worktapes is available to purchase and stream now.
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