Chattanooga, Tennessee-based singer-songwriter Teni Rane Butler (who performs as Teni Rane) knows how frustrating it can be not being able to have the right words to comfort someone they care about who’s in emotional pain. It’s why she wrote “Sail Into the Dark”, which we’re excited to premiere for you ahead of its official release on Friday.
You can listen to the track below:
Rane says she wrote the song as a “quiet promise to stay when someone I love is lost and hurting.”
“It’s about knowing I can’t steer their ship for them, but choosing to stand beside them anyway, offering my hand when the water gets too high,” she says. “The song holds my hope that presence, even without the right words, can be enough to keep someone from disappearing into the dark.”
The song is featured on her sophomore album No Turning Back, which will be released in September. It follows her 2020 EP Heart In Tennessee and 2024 debut Goldenrod. The Americana and folk-leaning artist’s new release was co-produced by Rane and Brent Bill, with additional production on “Soil on My Soul” by Dave Eggar and on “Sail Into The Dark” by Phil Faconti.
Rane (Lead Vocals, Acoustic Guitar, Background Vocals, Kalimba) is backed by a talented backing band of Phil Faconti (Acoustic, Electric, Classical, and Baritone Guitars), Dave Eggar (Cello, Piano, Keys), Brent Bill (Bass, Percussion), Parker Hall (Taps), Jonathan Shumaker (Bass), and Jivan Gasparyan, Jr. (Duduk).
Bill recorded and engineered the album at Redbud in Chattanooga, TN, with additional recordings on all tracks from Asteraceae Productions in Chattanooga, TN, and by AZ Productions in Los Angeles, CA, on “Secondhand Memories” and “Soil on My Soul”. It was mixed by Alex Wong (High Ceilings Music) in Nashville, TN, and mastered by Dave Polster (Well Made Music) in Bristol, VA.
According to a press release, the album is a “reflective journey through the many kinds of places people inhabit over a lifetime. Rooted in intimate storytelling and atmospheric arrangements, the album traces movement not only across landscapes, but also across inner terrain. Each song acts as a waypoint, capturing moments of arrival, departure, and the quiet in-between spaces where transformation often happens.”
That includes “Sail Into The Dark”. It touches on the album’s themes of joy, grief, hope, and resilience. It’s about pushing forward into the future blindly with the goal of helping others and – in the process – themselves.
The album has a “warmth and her own brand of moxie”, according to the press release, and “feels both deeply personal and widely resonant, inviting listeners to reflect on where they’ve been, where they are, and the unseen places still ahead.”
Elsewhere on the album, geography is a driving force. Here’s the press release’s description:
“Geographic place plays a grounding role throughout the record with tracks like ‘Arkansas” and “Soil on My Soul’ speaking to the pieces of our hearts that we leave behind or that we feel we’ve never fully found. The physical settings are not merely backdrops; they mirror the shifting states of the narrator and reflect restlessness, a craving for belonging, and the pull of the elusive feeling of home. Rane’s songwriting uses place as memory, where a location can hold the weight of a decision or the echo of who someone used to be.”
Social and cultural place in one’s life is also important, as evidenced by “Secondhand Memories” and “Driveway Conversations,” which, according to the press release, “inspect the roles we are assigned, the communities we navigate, and the expectations we push against or grow into.”
“Throughout the album, the lyrics linger in spaces of relational inflection points and introspective musings about how our inner and outer worlds are reconciled. Rane’s writing asks the listener to contemplate the quiet tension between fitting in and stepping away, between tradition and self-definition.”
For us at SWT, we can’t wait to hear more of what she has to offer!
You can connect with Teni Rane at the links below:
Website: Tenirane.com
Facebook: Facebook.com/teniranemusic
Instagram: Instagram.com/teniranemusic
YouTube: Youtube.com/@teniranemusic
Bandcamp: Tenirane.bandcamp.com
Spotify: Teni Rane on Spotify
Apple Music: Teni Rane on Apple Music
Joshua is co-founder of Scummy Water Tower. He’s freelanced for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including: Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Guitar World, MTV News, Grammy.com, Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, A.V. Club, SPIN, Alternative Press, Under the Radar, Paste, PopMatters, American Songwriter, and Relix. You can email him at josh@scummywatertower.com.
