Tenille Townes Headlines Friday Night of Long Road Festival 2023

Photography by Kendall Wilson

A shoe, a phone, a banana. In 2023, it’s become such de rigeur for audience members to hurl items at performers, that it’s easy to forget that sometimes they’re simply trying to be nice. That's probably how the first bra ever ended up on stage.

While no one was throwing bras at the stage for Tenille Townes’ Friday night headline set at The Long Road Festival, they were plying her with a bra’s longtime bedfellow: the humble kleenex. In fact, such are the tearjerkers of Tenille’s back catalogue, she has a friend who comes to each show armed with spares to hand her, so she told the audience at the Interstate Stage.

Tenille took the advice of her own track, ‘'The Last Time’', by decidedly not leaving the best until last; opening with a rollicking rendition of ‘'White Horse’'. Tracks like ‘'I Kept The Roses’' allowed the reedy vibrato of her voice to reverberate through the tent, whilst fan favourite ‘'Jersey on the Wall’' had the UK crowd characteristically shushing their neighbours.

Tenille nodded to a year of gigantic collaborations with a cover of 'Landslide' (she recently opened for Stevie Nicks in Toronto) and Bryan Adams collab 'The Thing That Wrecks You'.

At odds with the modern dilemma of how to meet people in real life, Bryan - she tells the Long Road crowd - had been only a dream of a collaboration until she ran into him in a stairwell by chance. Keeping the follow-up as old school as their meeting, Tenille recorded a track direct to CD and sent it to him in the post.

The crowd was in fine fettle for a singalong cover of Alanis Morissette’s Ironic. ‘This is a safe space,’ she told the tent, her particular brand of sheer earnestness as far from ironic as it can get.

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