The songs on the upcoming album, most of which she has written or co-written, go back to her earliest roots in country music and had her steering away from country-pop material. At least some of the tracks came from a particularly creative period for the artist during the pandemic, which found her collaborating with several songwriters. The material is much more in the storytelling tradition of country music than her past material, she says.
Fans will still have to wait until the album’s release this fall to hear the majority of the new tracks. On her current tour, which takes her to the Calgary Stampede’s Nashville North tent, she will be playing a few new songs. That presumably will include the newest single Chasing Tornadoes, a mid-tempo song about thrill-seeking in life and relationships that Porter performed last week in Nashville at the NHL Awards.
“It was like a cover band,” she said. “We played shows together. We didn’t write songs for it or anything like that. But that’s how I fell in love with performing. There was the band and then there was me, which was like the little dancing entertainer on the side going too hard on shows because I loved performing. That’s where I think I fell in love with more country-pop things over classical because I grew up playing classical music. It was like, ‘Oh, I like this so much more.
“There was like a year when I just could just not book an acting part,” she says. “I was so frustrated. That’s when I said, ‘You know what, I’m going to try to write songs,’ and I actually went to music recording school for a year to learn how to use pro tools and build my own tracks and I just fell in love with it.”