MITCHELL TENPENNY

                                                              "To Us It Did" 

                                                               Riser House/Columbia Nashville

Mitchell Tenpenny earned a lot of attention in 2020 with the release of “Broken Up,” and continued to ride that wave with “Bucket List,” a song which he released earlier this year to give us another dose of what we can expect from him in the very near future.

With his brand-new single “To Us It Did,” co-written with Jordan Schmidt and Hardy, Tenpenny looks back on all the ups and downs of growing up in a small town.

This subject matter is certainly no stranger to country music, however, the big question when someone is giving us yet another song about this is, how do you make it different enough to stand out when so much of it has already been done before?

There’s all the standard stuff that you’d expect from a song like this: drinking a whole case of beer, pick-up trucks, outrunning the blue lights, and a namecheck of The Dukes of Hazzard.

But, where “To Us It Did” becomes unique is in Tenpenny’s looking back approach that isn’t necessarily glorifying growing up with the small-town way of life, but rather admitting from the adult perspective that the things you thought mattered as a kid growing up don’t really mean to you what they used to mean.

Tenpenny, though fondly does look back, fully admits that things such as your first kiss didn’t in fact get you higher than the moon, that your first check from your first job didn’t really make you rich, that a brand-new guitar didn’t really make you a star, etc...

The driving tempo and big chorus are expertly designed to fit into country’s mainstream, and I suspect that these factors will smash into the nostalgia of the lyrics to help Tenpenny find his first Top 40 chart success since 2018’s “Drunk Me.”

(Review Written By: Jeffrey Kurtis)

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