Tanner Adell Sets Holler’s Saloon Stage On Fire at C2C Festival in London

Halfway through Tanner Adell’s set in The Saloon at Saturday lunchtime, a fire alarm starts going off, confirming what Holler has known for some time: Tanner Adell is the hottest thing in country music right now.

“I grew up between Star Valley and California”, she tells the audience, explaining the inspiration for ‘Tan Lines’, her opening song on The Saloon stage. “You know, California boys are really cute, but the Wyoming boys are cuter. They work with their dads all day long, so they've got a nice, thick, healthy tan line and a farmer's tan, and they got nice muscles because they genuinely work all day long".

“This song specifically is inspired by a boy that I had a huge crush on. His name was Landon Hamilton. And one day, I was driving back in from town to my house with my grandma. My grandma is, like, the most fabulous woman I've ever met. She taught me how to be fabulous. She was whipping on a dirt road in this cute, little Red Mercedes. And one day, we're driving down the road, coming back in from town, and luckily, I looked cute because town is about 25 minutes outside of where we lived”.

“I'm looking cute. Landon's over there,’ she continues. “I was really hoping I would see him out here. And we're driving back, and my grandma goes, ‘Oh, my God, look who’s outside. Landon and his daddy.’ She knew I had a crush on him. They're just working on a tractor or something. And I was like, grandma, don't. She goes, ‘Do you want to go say hi?’

“I was like, ‘No, grandma. Are you kidding? I can barely talk to this kid alone, let alone with my grandma,’ but she drives up anyway. It's kind of a long driveway, so I had a lot of time to think about what I was going to say, and as we get closer, I'm thinking, ‘Those tan lines are pretty thick. Is that a shirt, or is he… shirtless?’ I can't even tell at this point”.

“As we get closer, he was shirtless,” she tells the audience. “Oh, my God. 16-year-old me: dead. So, this song is inspired by me seeing my crush of the year shirtless on that day. Thank you, grandma. Here we go.”

'Tan Lines' is typical of Tanner Adell's uniquely irreverent style of country storytelling. Mixing her love for 90s and early 2000s country with a love for hip hop and R&B, this is a recipe for pop country she’s been perfecting ever since her early singles ‘Country Girl Commandments’ and ‘Honky Tonk Heartbreak'.

It's a glammed-up country sound she hilariously describes as "Funtry," and stripped of the trappy 808 beats of her recordings, with just an acoustic guitar for accompaniment, the songs still hit just as hard here, even without any of the kick and punch of her studio production.

“Growing up, y’all are from here,” Adell told the London audience before she played ‘Luke Combs,’ her tribute to all the girls who get written about in country songs. “So, I could understand if maybe you didn't feel like you were being fully represented in country music, even though you love listening to it. Maybe you didn't grow up hearing people singing about you. I felt the same way. I didn't grow up feeling very represented in country music. I'm biracial, and I didn't see a lot of people like that in country music. And this is really a love letter to myself, but also to people who don't feel like they're represented and don't see themselves in country music.”

“If Beyoncé does ever get around to making that country album she’s been hinting at, she’s going to find Tanner Adell has already beaten her to it,” Holler wrote back at the beginning of 2023 when the singer was our New Artist of The Week. A year and a bit later, with Beyoncé readying her own country album for the end of March, it’s a very different country landscape we’re looking out on. Something Adell jokingly alludes to when she sings the line, “Looking like Beyoncé with a lasso” in ‘Buckle Bunny’ later on at the Barrelhouse stage.

“That line didn’t age well,” she laughs mid song.

‘Buckle Bunny’ has become something of an anthem for the singer, flipping the historically derogatory term for a rodeo groupie into an anti-slut shaming, party popping summer anthem that sounds like nothing else in country right now.

“Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire,” someone once said, and over the weekend at C2C Festival in London, Tanner Adell has been setting alight every stage she played on with a hotter than blue blazes masterclass in post-genre country pop.

For more from C2C Festival 2024, see below: