{"id":1301533,"date":"2018-12-17T11:47:59","date_gmt":"2018-12-17T18:47:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cmt.com\/news\/?p=1801705"},"modified":"2018-12-17T11:47:59","modified_gmt":"2018-12-17T18:47:59","slug":"mitchell-tenpenny-talks-love-and-loss-on-telling-all-my-secrets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/music-news\/mitchell-tenpenny-talks-love-and-loss-on-telling-all-my-secrets\/","title":{"rendered":"Mitchell Tenpenny Talks Love and Loss on Telling All My Secrets"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/cmt.mtvnimages.com\/uri\/mgid:ao:image:cmt.com:665003?width=1200&amp;height=675&amp;.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\"\/><\/div>\n<p><span class=\"byline\">by <span class=\"author\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cmt.com\/news\/author\/tinglel\/\" title=\"Posts by Lauren Tingle\" rel=\"author\">Lauren Tingle<\/a><\/span> <span class=\"date\">35m ago<\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n<p>Mitchell Tenpenny is one of those rare musicians who is OK with his songs being bigger than his name.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s how he was raised growing up with his grandmother, Donna Hilley, a prominent figure in Music Row\u2019s publishing world. Before she passed in 2005, she helped facilitate the careers of Nashville\u2019s great tunesmiths, including Bobby Braddock, Taylor Swift and others, giving Tenpenny a front-row seat at the sacrifice music people encounter in their rise to prominence.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEven though my grandmother was in publishing, doors didn\u2019t always open for me,\u201d Tenpenny told CMT.com. \u201cI was very blessed to see people struggle for years before they finally get their break. I think that helped me with every, \u2018No,\u2019 I got. I\u2019ve gotten a million of them, and I still get them today. When you finally get a yes it just gives you all the hope you need.\u201d<\/p>\n<div class=\"deferred_content\">Embedded from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/BiA-7xHM8zc?feature=oembed\">www.youtube.com<\/a>. <noscript class=\"deferred_content\" data-deferred-info=\"{&quot;type&quot;:&quot;iframe&quot;}\"><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/BiA-7xHM8zc?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\">[embedded content]<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><\/noscript><\/div>\n<p>One of the first artists to believe in Tenpenny and help him break through was Granger Smith, who had success with one of Tenpenny\u2019s originals, \u201cIf the Boot Fits.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt changed my life because it opened so many doors for me to write more in the community,\u201d Tenpenny said. \u201cBut also, he took me out on the road first and let me open for him acoustically. I got to meet his fans and built a foundation starting from nowhere. He kept giving me that opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After a lifetime of writing songs (He initially started writing songs at age 12.), Tenpenny had more than 500 originals to choose from for his major-label debut, <em>Telling All My Secrets<\/em>. His goal was to create a body of work where country people could recognize themselves in every song.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFor me personally, I\u2019m always searching for my song on a record I\u2019m listening to,\u201d Tenpenny said. \u201cI wanted to make sure we had love, heartbreak, drinking, partying, even losing somebody, something that someone could attach themselves to. We whittled it down to 11 songs I felt like were me and where I\u2019m at now.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>Telling All My Secrets<\/em> touches on perennial country themes like love and loss in daring ways. The title song has soulful, \u201890s country nostalgia as Tenpenny sings about a man who finally finds a love who accepts him for who he is. He says the hardest lyrics to write was the closing song, \u201cWalk Like Him,\u201d about losing his father who died from cancer three years ago.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy mom and grandma used to say I walk like him with my feet at 10 and two,\u201d Tenpenny recalled. \u201cWhen you lose somebody, it takes a little time for it to hit you, at least it did for me. I just went into, \u2018I gotta take care of my family,\u2019 mode.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI was driving one night late after a gig, and my band was asleep in the back of the van. I just broke down. That\u2019s where it hit me was just on the road. I guess there was something about that loneliness. That title came to me, and I was thinking, \u2018I\u2019m going to write it. I just don\u2019t know when.\u2019 When it came time for this record, I just did it. It was the most I had ever teared up in a write.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And Tenpenny\u2019s good for songs about drinking. He\u2019s having a moment with his breakout song, \u201cDrunk Me.\u201d And his next single, the anthemic \u201cAlcohol You Later,\u201d is a play-on-words about drinking someone\u2019s memory away.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe fans chose this one,\u201d Tenpenny says of \u201cAlcohol You Later.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s one of those things where people are singing back and they really enjoy it. It\u2019s just a fun hook. I think everyone\u2019s been there in their own part, too, where you get your heart broken, you\u2019ve got to drink them off your mind and then you\u2019re sitting there texting them when you said you never would.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Tenpenny is in the middle of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cmt.com\/news\/1801271\/mitchell-tenpenny-plots-album-release-tour\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Telling All My Secrets Album Release tour<\/a>. The run continues Friday (Dec. 20) in Grand Rapids, Mich.<\/p>\n<div class=\"author\">\n<div class=\"description\">Lauren Tingle is a Tennessean and storyteller who eats music for breakfast, lunch and dinner. When she\u2019s not writing or rocking out, she enjoys yoga and getting lost in the great outdoors.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cmt.com\/news\/1801705\/mitchell-tenpenny-talks-love-and-loss-on-telling-all-my-secrets\/\" target=\"_blank\">via:: CMT News<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Lauren Tingle 35m ago Mitchell Tenpenny is one of those rare musicians who is OK with his songs being bigger than his name. That\u2019s how he was raised growing up with his grandmother, Donna Hilley, a prominent figure in Music Row\u2019s publishing world. Before she passed in 2005, she helped facilitate the careers of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[159],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1301533","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-11 05:12:01","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1301533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301533\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1301533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1301533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1301533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}