Catching Time in Rhymes: Honors Alumna Headlines House Concert

By Shelby Gill

Album Art: Teni Rane

As summer dips into fall, goldenrods bloom across the roadsides in Arkansas, and at the end of this past goldenrod season, Teni Rane, singer-songwriter, Honors College Fellow, alumna and Razorback student-athlete, returned to campus to share her debut album, named after the aureate plant that blossoms in periods of transition.   

Rane (B.S.Ch.E., summa cum laude, ’16), a folk singer-songwriter from Chattanooga, Tennessee, celebrated the release of Goldenrod with a performance alongside Grammy-nominated cellist Dave Eggar and guitarist Phil Faconti. The Honors Student Lounge transformed into an intimate venue, where Rane’s powerful voice and reflections on self-growth resonated deeply through the walls of Gearhart. Her narrative meditated on the construct of success and how the barometer for meaning shifts in tune with time.

Describing the title track, she shared her love for nature’s “in-between moments” while admitting her deep fear of change in her own life.

“Penned at a time when a multitude of changes made life feel like every piece and part of me was up for renegotiation, the collection of songs presented in Goldenrod explores what it means to make progress through life without erasing the lessons and emotions of the past and present,” Rane noted.  

Goldenrod garnered nominations from the Hollywood Independent Music Awards and Folk Alliance International in 2024. It was also pre-nominated for a 2025 Grammy Award for Best Folk Album.

Heralding her vocals and own brand of country-infused, Americana-folk-pop, Twangville compared Rane’s voice to “a favorite cardigan” while Guitar Girl Magazine commented on her “dreamy, velvet timbres.” Dave Franklin, a journalist at the Big Takeover, argued “the best music makes you think; it also makes you feel, but Teni Rane’s music can make you remember.” Rane’s performance at the Honors College did just that. She wove storytelling throughout her set, sparking recollections in the audience with both original compositions and her thunderous rendition of folk classics.

“Teni is one of our exceptional alumni whose career trajectory has taken her into diverse and unexpected places, from corporate engineering to professional athletics and back again to the guitar, a lifelong passion now foregrounded in a highly successful career as a professional musician,” said Lynda Coon, dean of the Honors College.

Season 1: finding home on campus 

Before committing to play soccer at the U of A, Rane visited 18 campuses and applied to 11 institutions. In Arkansas, she was impressed by the women’s soccer program and the rigor of academics through the College of Engineering and the Honors College. She also felt kinship with the nature of Northwest Arkansas.   

“It was the first campus that I stepped on where I could see myself being there,” she said. “On others, I could see myself dropping in and visiting. Fayetteville reminded me of Chattanooga, a little bit smaller and familiar flora and fauna.” 

Following her recruiting visit for soccer, she applied for an Honors College Fellowship and began asking questions about how the university could support both her athletic and scholarly goals.  

“I was very upfront with the coaching staff about my academic care and ambitions,” Rane said. “It was apparent at the get-go that I wouldn’t be doing it alone. The Honors College and College of Engineering staff were supportive of me.”  

While playing soccer at a professional level — helping the Razorbacks reach the NCAA Tournament — Rane also conducted research on particulate matter emissions from wood burning, studied renewable and sustainable energy in Spain and Iceland, and volunteered her time performing live music at shelters throughout Fayetteville. Ten years ago, Rane was interviewed by the Honors College for A+ Magazine, and even then, she cited music as a “soothing” foundation for her studies and athletic competition. 

“Music was a wonderful way to disconnect from the intensity of both soccer and engineering,” Rane recalled. “I would visit 7hills Homeless Center and play music at lunch for the folks who were there. When you’re in an unhoused state, likely, you don’t have access to a lot of live music, so it felt like a wonderful way to get to know people and share my songs.” 

Photo Credit: Earl Neikirk

Season 2: Negotiating Adulthood  

Rane graduated in 2016 and was given the Senior of Significance title by the Arkansas Alumni Association. She was also awarded a spot on the women’s Swedish soccer team P18 K Fotboll Klubb for the spring and fall. She returned to the United States when soccer season ended to begin working for a Fortune 500 company as an engineer. 

As she moved to a new city and started her full-time career, many of the reliable cogs in Rane’s life kept running, but her experience began to shift as she “renegotiated and figured out what it meant to be an adult.”  

“Something I think doesn’t get a lot of airtime or space is the transition from athletics,” she noted. “What does it mean to be healthy in my own body without coaching? What type of food is good for me when it’s not performance-based dieting? There was so much to figure out in those first years that I honestly forgot I owned a guitar.”  

Season 3: Rediscovering music  

Music faded from her life for several years until her husband dug Rane’s guitar out of a closet and placed it in the living room.  

“Music was accessible again,” Rane said, smiling. “It was right there. I started playing, dabbling and softly fell back into it.”  

By 2019, Rane knew she wanted music to be a larger part of her life. She wanted to record her own songs. She began the process of recording her EP, but as the project wrapped up, life shifted again. The person Rane was working with disappeared with her money and recordings. 

“I felt so betrayed by music,” Rane admitted. “I had tried to invest in and lean into this space that felt really safe, and it hurt me in a big way.”  

Rane said she thought maybe this was the universe telling her not to pursue music professionally, but then, the pandemic shifted her world again. While working from home, she confided in a coworker about her challenging experience recording an EP. To Rane’s surprise, the coworker had a home recording studio, and they wanted to help.  

SEASON 4: EMBRACING SHOULDER SEASON 

By November 2020, Rane had an EP to release, and the experience of recording her own music lit a spark. She began playing live shows and made the difficult decision to step away from engineering in the spring of 2022.

“I had a summer musical residency back where I played soccer in Sweden,” she said. “It was an incredible gift because it allowed me space and perspective to play music, teach yoga and see how I felt doing those things.”  

As she encountered challenging feelings about personal identity, she began to pen Goldenrod. As she wrote, she kept revisiting the question, “How are other people who have only ever known me as Teni, the chemical engineering soccer player, going to relate to me anymore? Will they care the same ways they cared about my life and success in the past?” 

When she returned to the United States, she was invited to play at the Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion music festival in Bristol, Tennessee. There, she met Eggar and Faconti and shared her inspiration for Goldenrod with them, and they wanted to be a part of her vision.  

“I knew the shape of the album before I wrote it,” Rane said. She also knew the title, but that wasn’t the first song she penned. When she finally sat down to write the titular piece, she finished it in one pass at her dining room table.  

“It was equal parts cathartic and scary,” she said. “I wanted to say, ‘I don’t know where I’m going, but I figure any road will get me there.’”  

She recorded the album over the course of a year, which lent itself to her investigation of seasons and change.  

“I was inspired by shoulder season,” she said. “As summer fades and fall comes into view, and all that happens in that moment can feel big and beautiful, but it’s also reassuring. This cycle happens every year, and at the end, we come back around. Change happens, and it doesn’t have to break you.”  

In her return to campus, Rane reflected thoughtfully on what her story might mean to other students navigating significant change.

“Change is very hard,” she noted. “There’s a strong urge to let your whole identity be wrapped up in roles you’ve filled in the past. I still struggle with this a lot, and that’s why I was so touched when I got a call from the Honors College to perform. To be able to perform for honors students — in a space I occupied with very different goals and ambitions — is beautiful because it tells other students it’s okay to be on this road and decide to take a new exit later.”   

Following the House Concert, Rane was invited to an artist residency at the Idaho Fine Arts Academy in Boise. There, she helped bring to life Echoes of Compassion, a multidisciplinary performance exploring empathy and connection through the arts with primary and secondary students. Students in music, dance, theater and visual arts performed alongside Rane and her fellow teaching artists. She is returning to Idaho to record a music video with one of the dance students who performed at the event.

“I did quite a bit of educational outreach with engineering,” Rane said. “It has been such a joy to step into that same space in the music world. If there had been an adult artist who valued what I was doing and invested in that, I know it would have meant so much to me as a young artist, so I’m excited to help this student with her first commissioned piece.”

She has continued her outreach efforts by partnering with the Creative Discovery Museum in Chattanooga, where she helps children write and record their own piece of music to take home.

Rane is also working on her second studio album, which contemplates the meaning of place and the tangible spaces we inhabit. Through the writing process, she’s also exploring her own heritage — navigating what it means to be the daughter of two separate cultures and what it takes to belong and to allow yourself to belong.

“I’m focusing on how we make a home — how we find our place in the world,” Rane explained. “The album orbits around themes of kinship, homesickness, what happens in our manmade environment, and what we rely on in that space. It has some geographical narratives of movement towards physical places. The collection also explores the work of creating and understanding a home inside.”

She is once again collaborating closely with Eggar and Faconti to develop the bold instrumental landscape for this collection. A newly recorded song she performed at the Honors College House Concert, titled “Arkansas,” will be featured on the album. The track explores Rane’s evolving relationship with the idea of home, speaking “to the moment when you feel the subtle change and realize that a piece of your heart and story has taken root in a new place.”

“There’s boundless joy, fun and adventure in this next album,” Rane said. “But there are also some tender, vulnerable and scary-to-share stories in there as well.”

Photo Credit: Tom Netherland