Tiera Kennedy is having one of the biggest years of her career — but things weren’t looking so promising last winter.
The 26-year-old country star had been dropped from her record label after spending more than two years working on her debut album (and eight years in Nashville). It was one of the lowest moments of her professional life, but she soon got a boost from no less an authority than Beyoncé, who enlisted Kennedy for guest vocals on “Blackbiird” and “Tyrant” from her Cowboy Carter album.
“When that happened, I was like, ‘Wow, God. You really do have a plan for everything,’” Kennedy exclusively told Us Weekly. “Getting asked to be on the Cowboy Carter album really felt like a wink from God of like, ‘You’ve got this, you can do this on your own.’”
Doing it on her own seems to have worked in Kennedy’s favor, because her debut album, Rooted, is finally coming out — and it feels right this time, she says.
“I definitely feel like since leaving my label, I’m just more confident in who I actually am as an artist and what that sound is,” Kennedy told Us ahead of Rooted’s Friday, October 18, release. “And so when I left my label, we decided to dig back into that R&B country sound that I was doing before I signed, and we dug back into the archives and got some songs that we had written from years ago that we felt fit in the vibe. I joke when I say it felt like it took a long time, but it really did. It took a couple years for this album to come together.”
After going back to the drawing board, only a few songs from the original version of Rooted — including “Better Than Me,” “I Ain’t a Cowgirl” and “I’d Look Good in That Truck” — made it onto the LP that fans will soon hear.
While Kennedy admitted that losing her record deal was “bittersweet,” she’s much happier with the way the album sounds now. The new version is truer to her style, which she calls R&B country — and should be familiar to anyone who’s had Cowboy Carter on repeat since March.
“It feels like this really cohesive sound of who I actually am, which is a little bit of country and a little bit of R&B. So you’ve got all of those notes in the album,” Kennedy explained, noting that she didn’t leave her label by choice. “I didn’t feel like I was able to put out music that really spoke to me. Sometimes it was hard to even put out music, period. So, when I got the news that they were dropping me, of course there was this sadness, but there was also this excitement of what could be.”
Kennedy lights up when talking about Rooted, which feels intensely personal to her. On “Can’t Help My Country,” for example, she sings about loving classic artists like Charley Pride and Dolly Parton — and also Deana Carter’s “Strawberry Wine,” which is a touchstone for any country fan who came of age when The Chicks and Shania Twain were bringing a new strain of feminism to the genre.
“Charley Pride, that was the first record that my grandmother ever gave me,” Kennedy said of the groundbreaking artist who died in 2020 at age 86. “At the time, I didn’t really know the history of country music. My family is so great in the fact that when I got into country music, they never told me, ‘You can’t do this because there’s not a lot of people that look like you.’ They showed me the examples of the people that were here in country, just really encouraging me to look at those people like Charley Pride that have had so many accomplishments in this genre.”
Kennedy also references more contemporary country trends on Rooted, as on the cheeky track “I’d Look Good in That Truck.” Truck songs are a staple of country music, to the point that the less creative ones sound like parodies, but Kennedy’s take isn’t really about the vehicle — it’s about falling in love with the (taken) guy driving it.
“If you weren’t with her / Might be us by the river / With a blanket laid down in the bed,” she sings on the second verse. “Maybe it’s wrong / And my chance is long gone / But I can’t get it out of my head.”
Another song is quite literally titled “Sweet Home Alabama,” although it has no relation to the Lynyrd Skynyrd classic of the same name. Kennedy’s version, cowritten with Jared Scott, is about her relationship with her husband of three years, Kamren.
“We loved the fact that we knew that people were gonna look at this song and be like, question mark? Like, what is that?” Kennedy told Us. “We just wanted to completely mess it up and have it not be what people were expecting.”
Defying expectations is an idea that’s all over Rooted and one that has become more personal for Kennedy over the past year or so.
“For a long time when I was deciding what songs to put out, I had that in the back of my mind of like, ‘OK, there’s gotta be a certain amount of country so that nobody comes after me and says I’m not actually a country artist,’” she explained. “But when we revamped Rooted, I just was like, ‘You know what? I don’t care if people think this isn’t country enough.’ These songs mean something and they say something, and I think that’s all that matters at the end of the day. I don’t really care about fitting in a certain box. I care about reaching people and making people feel seen and making people feel something through my music. And so whatever genre it belongs in, whatever genre people think that it belongs in, OK — as long as people are listening and feel heard, that’s all I care about.”
Tiera Kennedy’s Rooted is out Friday, October 18.
