Story Behind the Song: Tenille Arts, ‘Everybody Knows Everybody’
Tenille Arts' "Everybody Knows Everybody" is a celebration of small-town life — even the parts that make it hard to have much privacy. She co-wrote the song with Allison Veltz Cruz and Alex Kline, the two women with whom she penned her record-setting first No. 1 single, "Somebody Like That."
"They're so great at really taking my stories and elevating them," Arts says of the two songwriters. "I just tell them what I've lived through, and they take it and make it into something really great."
Arts grew up in the Canadian town of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, and admits that she "really actually experienced" plenty of what she sings about in "Everybody Knows Everybody." Below, she shares the story behind the song, in her own words.
This was a writing session with Allison Veltz and Alex Kline, the same people that I wrote "Somebody Like That" with. We were just talking about — we wanted to write a fun song that day, and they were just asking me about my hometown and what that's like, and what growing up there was like, and all of that.
I started just going into the fact that it's so small: There's, like, one bar that everybody goes to, and everybody knows way too much about each other, and I think it was Allison that started singing that hook at the end, that "everybody knows everybody" thing, and that was what really sparked the whole thing.
It was a really fun, easy write, because we were just literally talking about pretty much every small town out there. Everybody's pretty much experienced that same thing, where it's just kind of too small [laughs] -- you know, when you go out to the bar, it's like, "Well, I know that person used to be with that person," and you can kind of put that all together in any small town.
It's really kind of a celebration of that ... We were just kind of celebrating how fun that can be ...
I love the line about people walking in like they're famous. I think that is like, [in] every small town, there's always that group of people that, they walk into the bar and you're like, "Oh, okay" — they think they're cool and all that. I think that perfectly sums up what a small town can be like ...
There's just so much fun stuff in there — just really great pictures of one stoplight, one church, all of that stuff.
Who Is Tenille Arts? 5 Things You Need to Know: