Kara Frazier picked Madeiro up at the airport.
They had never met before.
Forty-eight hours later they had written a song, recorded it and filmed a music video.
Which sounds like the beginning of a story about working very quickly.
It isn't really.
The interesting part is that somewhere during those two days, Tennessee stopped being the name of the place they were standing in.
It became a person.
That is the idea at the centre of Tennessee.
Finding home in somebody else.
A simple thought.
Although home is rarely simple.
Especially here.
Madeiro had arrived from Colombia and was building a life in a new country.
Kara's relationship with Tennessee was very different. Originally from Jacksonville, Florida, she had already spent more than a decade building a life and a musical career in Nashville.
One had arrived.
The other had stayed.
Then they wrote a song about belonging.
You couldn't plan that much better.
Perhaps they didn't.
There is something wonderfully ordinary about the beginning of the collaboration.
No long studio courtship.
No months of sending files backwards and forwards.
An airport pickup.
Hello.
Nice to finally meet you.
Right.
Let's make something.
The speed matters because the song needed trust before it needed time.
And apparently that arrived rather quickly.
Kara comes from southern roots, blues and soul. Madeiro's path started elsewhere. The Colombian songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist came through rock and an acoustic roots vocabulary, winning Factor X Colombia in 2021 before continuing to develop his own work as an artist and producer.
Useful background.
But Tennessee works better when you stop looking at their résumés.
Because the title immediately sets a small trap.
A song called Tennessee arrives and you think you know approximately where it is going.
Roads.
Nashville.
Maybe a porch if we're unlucky.
This song has another idea.
Kara describes Tennessee as the feeling of finding home in another person.
That changes the geography rather nicely.
Home can be Jacksonville.
Colombia.
Nashville.
Or none of them.
Sometimes it is simply whoever makes you feel that you have arrived.
And suddenly the circumstances around the song matter more.
Madeiro had literally just arrived.
Kara was the person waiting for him.
There is the song.
Almost embarrassingly neat.
Except the idea underneath it isn't.
Leaving somewhere changes your understanding of home.
So does staying somewhere long enough to build one.
And falling close to another person can make the whole definition rather unreliable.
That is where Tennessee finds its emotional centre.
Two people with completely different relationships to place meet for the first time and discover enough common language to write together almost immediately.
Forty-eight hours is a good headline.
The connection is the better story.
Because songs don't care how long they took to write.
Three months can produce absolutely nothing.
An afternoon can give you the line you were looking for.
What matters is whether you believe it when the song starts playing.
Tennessee gives its title somewhere to go.
By the end, you are thinking less about a state.
More about that strange moment when another person begins to feel like somewhere you could stay.
Funny.
Madeiro had only just landed.