Mitchell Tenpenny On How Embracing Boundaries Inspired ‘Ain’t My Problem’: ‘This Industry Makes You Try to Please Everybody’
Categoria: Musica
Billboard's Makin' Tracks looks at the writing and recording behind Mitchell Tenpenny's new single "Ain't My Problem."
Por Billboard | 02/10/2026
“If you need me, don’t ask.” There may be more graceful ways to put someone off, but few things will bring freedom to a life like learning to say “no.” It’s something Mitchell Tenpenny has dealt with in therapy, learning to form boundaries — and his new single “Ain’t My Problem,” released by Riser House to country radio via PlayMPE on Sept. 9, embodies that life lesson in the form of a fist-pumping anthem. “This industry easily makes you try to please everybody, and it’s just impossible,” the singer says. “So this song for me is kind of healing. It’s like, ‘Look, that’s not my problem no more, man. I got so many other things to focus on.’” When Tenpenny and his co-writers first tried to write the song, they really did have other things grabbing their attention. It was Aug. 14, 2025, the first day of a writing retreat hosted by Winsongs Music at a house on Florida’s Navarre Beach, owned by the publishing company’s founder, songwriter-producer Chris DeStefano (“From the Ground Up,” “Something in the Water”). DeStefano had hooked up a new piece of gear to his digital audio workstation, and the program downloaded a driver that clashed with Ableton, a ProTools-like music creation platform. The program froze repeatedly after recording a small amount of audio. “That whole morning was soul-crushing for probably two or three hours,” DeStefano recalls. The issue did, however, create the right emotional atmosphere to write a song like “Ain’t My Problem.” They pointedly made it energetic, which worked like a metaphoric release valve to exorcise their tech-related angst. DeStefano kicked into a quasi-rock groove on acoustic guitar, and the guys launched into a chorus about shaking off uncontrollable hassles and restoring positivity. In a related move, Tenpenny and co-writer Andy Albert (“Somewhere Over Laredo,” “Bigger Houses”) announced that they wanted to use whatever lyrics presented themselves instead of obsessing over every word. “We both were just like, ‘This time, we’re going with the first answer that comes to our head,” Tenpenny recalls. As a result, the work went fast. Tenpenny thought the musical foundation would benefit from amping up the sound, so DeStefano doubled the acoustic guitar with an electric model. He also threw in a Mexican-made Fender Precision bass with an ascendant, four-note pattern in the chorus that emphasized the tension in the unresolved passages of that section. “The strings are literally decades old,” DeStefano says. “I tried replacing them once, and the bass just didn’t sound the same, so I put the old strings back on. But because the strings are so old, it just has … this thuddy kind of tone to it. It just oozes inspiration.” They found, within that chorus, a number of ways to essentially say “leave me alone,” refusing to buy into the dramas that others consider a priority: “If you need me, don’t ask,” they summarized in the fourth chorus line. Tenpenny changed the phrasing in the next line, and the room stumble