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Tanner Adell is crowded into her dressing room trailer's bathroom, dolloping on her signature lavender eyeshadow. She's wearing an oversized t-shirt with animated frogs across the front, her hair in two braided pigtails, bunny slippers on her feet. It feels like watching your best friend get ready in her dorm room before a fun night out. It might be one of those memorable nights at the honky-tonk that'll surely require a post-party debrief.
"I'm so glad we got to do this with someone who knows who I am," she says with a smile and a welcoming Southern drawl as she draws on two precise liquid eyeliner wings. Adell still does her own makeup, not only because it's financially sound, but because she has yet to find someone who does it the way she likes. "Sometimes people show up, and they're like, 'So, who are you?' and I have to say, 'Well, this is a movement, and you're obviously not on the train,' so it's good to have you here."
2024 has been a movement for the musician, who has seen her star rise over the past few years through a combination of hard work, TikTok virality, and a Beyoncé endorsement. Now, she’s about to go onstage at Hangout Music Festival in Gulf Shores, Alabama, further cementing her star power as a performer with signature style and hits to spare. She’s still grappling with that growth.
"Every time I go out [to perform], I'm like, 'What if no one's there? Oh my God, what if no one shows up?'" she says. The night before her debut at the festival, Adell was in Atlanta performing at Country Music Television's Hot Prospects Series. "I'm behind the stage, and I hear them say, 'Tanner Adell is here tonight,'" she recalls of the Atlanta show. "It was like a wall of screaming. I ended up playing to a ton of people that night. Atlanta showed out, and the CMT Hot Prospects team said it was the biggest turnout they had ever seen."
Adell's faith sits at the epicenter of her being. She knows she was put here on this earth for a reason: to make music. "I always get a little bit choked up and a little bit emotional," she says about being on stage. "It really doesn't matter how many people are there. I know there will always be one person who needed to see me that day."
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Tanner Adell is a country music fan's wild card. She was adopted from her birthplace of Lexington, Kentucky, and raised between Manhattan Beach, California, and Star Valley, Wyoming. She isn't a traditional cowgirl, necessarily, but she’s a Southern dynamite all the same.
As a biracial Black woman with white adoptive parents, Adell has spent most of her life knowing what it means to be unable to check just one box. She exists as a multitude of origins and foundations, perfectly built to place her here, onstage, singing her version of the cowboy blues.
"I'm not just another girl making country music," she tells Teen Vogue. "I'm opening up a lane for people like you and me to come in and feel welcome here. I don't belong in boxes. I'm the poster child for [people who say] 'I hate country music, but I listen to Tanner Adell.' … I don't want to have to feel like I have to follow any rules when it comes to music.”
Adell got to see firsthand what it means to stand up against an industry hellbent on pigeonholing Black artists. This past March, she was featured on two songs, "Blackbiird" and "Ameriican Requiem," on Beyoncé's album Cowboy Carter. An album in which Beyoncé herself reminded the world: "This ain't a country album; this is a Beyoncé album." The collab was the best kept secret; even her parents couldn't know until the day it came out. The Beatles’ original "Blackbird" is Adell's father's favorite song, so sharing a massive milestone in her career with him meant the world.
Similar to the boundary-pushing Americana-inspired Beyoncé album, Adell is setting out to prove there isn't just one way to be a country artist.
"Thank you, Sister B, for shedding that light on me," Adell says. "I love country music, and I respect country music. A lot of the time, though, the listeners tend to put country music in a box. They don't like when people mix country music with their own personal style."
Her mixture of rap verses, Southern twang, and bolstering ballads — with her guitar and banjo always in tow — lends itself to the Western dream world she's trying to build, a dream world all her own.
"My story has never been heard and never been told," she says. "And it's helped create the sound that I make. There are people out there, like myself, that have lived different experiences that are also country."
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Spending summers in Star Valley, Adell recalls thinking she and her brothers were the "only Black people in town." She felt like she existed "on the outskirts." There weren't many Black folks around her growing up, and white people didn't always treat her like kin, so she often found community back in California during the school year with her Latino classmates, hoping to hold onto any form of cultured existence.
And while she felt different, her adoptive father always made sure she knew her roots and he never shied away from discussing racism, even when she was young. In their household, it had a name. She recalls her father constantly checking in to ensure no one was treating her differently.
"My dad has really protected me and made sure that I was aware that there might be some prejudice against me," she says. "But he was willing to fight somebody if I came home and said, 'Someone said this about my hair.' He would be like, ‘Who? I'm calling their parents.'"
Her family and support system constantly lifted her up, which is the reason she is able to pursue her dreams unabashedly. In college at Utah Valley University, Adell worked with a vocal coach who shaped her artistry, ultimately leading her to pursue country stardom.
"I sat down and played her some of my stuff and she was like, 'You could really, really do this if you wanted to,'" she says. "I told her, 'I want to, but I just want to record the songs. I don't know if I can do the whole going out on stage part because I have such bad stage anxiety.'"
If you've seen Adell perform, you'd never guess she once wanted to deny herself the stage. Her vocal coach ultimately told her that stage fright was common, but that it comes from a lack of confidence. "The problem basically was just that I wasn't fully confident in my ability as a singer," she says. "So I physically trained my vocals to be so good technically that there would be no doubt in my mind before going out on stage that I would just kill it."
Now, watching her caper, bounce, and twirl across the Mermaid Stage at Hangout Festival feels otherworldly. She’s present, reacting to the crowd and bouncing energy back off them. "I have zero nerves now," she tells me post-performance. "Performing live is my absolute favorite thing to do."
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In addition to the practice, what Adell credits most to overcoming this anxiety was therapy. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is one of Adell's therapy tactics. It's a type of treatment that focuses on reducing the power of traumatic memories through cognitive behavioral therapy. A therapist trains you to get into a relaxed mental state and then uses rapid eye movement to help you recenter.
"My word is glitter," she says while pointing at the tattoo on her forearm. "The therapy technique focuses on putting all my anxiety into a box and pushing it down the river, and it was on this huge unicorn, so I got a tattoo of a unicorn with my anxiety deletion word under it. I would say, 'Glitter, glitter, glitter, glitter, glitter.'"
Adell refers to her style as "glam country," so glitter, sparkles, and everything shiny feel intrinsic to her identity. She attributes a lot of that to her grandmother. While Adell spent a lot of time outside as a proper country tomboy, she also loved the glitz and glam of being a girly girl.
"My grandmother is the one who taught me how to be hardworking," she says. "I was out with my grandpa on the John Deere, mowing the lawns, fixing the fences, tearing down beaver dams, and shoveling horse sh*t. But she also taught me how to do lashes and my makeup and paint my nails. She bought me my first pair of heels and took me shopping for pretty dresses for church on Easter."
Adell keeps the maternal figures in her life close to her while on stage. She lovingly wears her grandmother's pearls around her neck, and her mother's rodeo championship belt buckle and ribbons tacked across her custom white shorts.
Adell's Hangout setlist consists of almost everything in her repertoire. She powerfully sings to "FU-150" and "Love You a Little Bit" then tosses her hips through "Buckle Bunny," songs that have collectively garnered millions of streams. She has built a loyal fan base, all while being an independent artist. Right after "Love You a Little Bit" blew up on social media in 2022, Adell signed to Columbia Records; she then released her first studio album Buckle Bunny in 2023. Columbia didn't feel like the right fit for Adell, so she decided to leave the record label — that moment was only a few short days before Cowboy Carter was announced.
"God's timing is very real," she says. "I signed my release papers from Sony Columbia two days before the Super Bowl before Beyoncé dropped those two tracks. I don't know if two days later they would've let me out of my contract, and that was not the right home for me."
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Her world is now nonstop as an independent artist creating her own pathway, but she prefers it that way. She has to force herself to sleep nights before show days to ensure she's well-rested for every performance. If not, she'd stay up through the night, mapping everything out, from merchandise to new songs.
"I'm a workaholic, so being able to go out on that stage and play is my treat," she says. "Not because I am a bunny, but that's my little dangling carrot. The live show is the carrot dangling, and everything else is just me on the treadmill chasing after it. When I finally get to play, I get my yummy carrot."
Adell's sophomore studio album is set to release in a few months. Her single "Whiskey Blues" is already in the top five of her most streamed songs on Spotify. She has seen many viral moments in the last four years, and every one is a reminder that she's doing exactly what she's meant to do.
While she won't give anything away, she says her next album has a ton of features, and you'll never be able to guess who because they're all so different from each other. This past February, she was also named to CMT Next Women of Country: Class of 2024, constantly proving that showing up as your truest form can still get you through every door you've ever imagined.
"It's more than just a show. It's more than just music. It's more than a song. I'm more than just an artist," she says through choked tears in her trailer. "It's a movement. I have a purpose. I don't know if many artists can say that, but I know my purpose and see it every time I go out [on stage]. I take it very, very seriously."
Adell quickly laughs off the tears, admitting that she's a triple Cancer and is "totally controlled by the moon."
"I cry a lot. I love crying," she says, showing me her crab tattoo representing her hard shell and soft, emotional insides. "And it's not just angry or sad crying. I'm just really sensitive, even to music. It could be someone who I've never heard of before. Watching them perform makes me emotional just because it's somebody sharing their gift."
You can feel it while she's on stage. She's giving you everything she has up there. Her set at Hangout Festival started with roughly a hundred devoted fans singing along to every word. By the end of her forty-five-minute performance, at least three hundred people gathered around the stage, bopping their heads to every song. The crowd chanted "Tanner" in unison, her bona fide star power shining through. As I pressed through the crowd, sludging through the Alabama heat, I overheard latecomers to the performance jubilantly revering to their friends: "Yo, she bangs!" and "She's f*cking good dude." Tanner Adell has got them — hook, line, and sinker.
“You know how they say when you're in love, you'll know?" she says. "And getting butterflies and anxiety around somebody is a horrible sign because you should feel calm. They should put your nervous system at ease. That's how I feel. When I'm not doing the right thing, I have doubts or questions and a lot of anxiety, but when I know I'm doing the right thing, it's that calm. That's how it is when I'm on stage. I know this is what I'm supposed to do.”
