Nashville's Newest Voice

Demo recordings, those rough sketches of what songs might sound like once they're fully produced, aren't typically meant for public consumption. That's especially true in Nashville, where mainstream labels still test new artists' viability by leading with a polished product: the radio-ready single. But when Columbia Nashville introduced Tenille Townes as the newest addition to its roster in April, the announcement wasn't paired with any glossy tracks. What we got instead was the 24-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter's spare acoustic EP, Living Room Worktapes.

Introducing her that way was hardly a hasty, unconsidered move. Though the label was just starting its public promotion of Townes, her professional journey stretched back years. Throughout her teens, the Canadian country music scene had been her training ground, and she'd spent the last half-decade in Nashville, distilling her style and finding a publisher, manager and label willing to bet on her. During an exploratory period, she did some recording with Daniel Tashian, one of the writer-producers behind Kacey Musgraves' shimmering, kaleidoscopic ruminations on Golden Hour, before ultimately beginning work on an album with uber producer Jay Joyce.

But she and her team elected to reshuffle their release strategy: an unvarnished, four-song project with Tashian would come first. Without any additional players, Townes and Tashian laid down a pair of her humanizing, empathetic portraits of suffering ("Somebody's Daughter" and "Jersey on the Wall") and two romantic declarations, one gallant ("Where You Are") and the other knowing ("White Horse"). He captured her warbling, crooning and curling her vowels into heartfelt confidences