Avery Anna

Flagstaff, a church pew and a bathtub

Avery Anna Rhoton was born on 2 March 2004 in Flagstaff, Arizona. She sang in church as a child and learned the older country repertoire from a guitar-playing grandfather — Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, as she told Billboard in 2022. After her baptism at eight she was given a journal, and the journal turned into the working method: she taught herself guitar and had written her first song by around fifth grade.

The way out of Arizona was a phone camera. In October 2020 she filmed herself covering a Christina Aguilera ballad in the bathtub, chosen for the acoustics of a tiled room. It took about ten million views on TikTok and reached Matt Thomas of Parmalee, who passed it to the producer David Fanning. Fanning messaged her on Instagram, became her manager and her co-writer, and with Andy Sheridan and Ben Williams helped build "Narcissist" out of the journal entries. Kelly Clarkson later sang the song on her daytime programme.

Nashville at seventeen

She finished her last year of school over Zoom in May 2021 and moved to Nashville that summer at seventeen. Warner Music Nashville signed her in June 2022, the debut EP Mood Swings came in October 2022, and she made her Grand Ole Opry debut on 30 September 2022 — three months after signing.

The early road work was support: opening slots for Josh Turner, Parmalee and Martina McBride in 2022, followed by two modest headline runs in 2023 billed as the Narcissist Tour and the Treat Yourself Nice Tour. The scale of those rooms matters to what happened later, because the current show is still built on the intimacy they taught her.

Two albums made out of other people's confessions

Breakup Over Breakfast arrived on 19 July 2024 — seventeen tracks, every one of them co-written by Anna, with Hillary Lindsey, Liz Rose, Lori McKenna, Dylan Marlowe and Parmalee among the collaborators. It is a long debut and an unusually unfiltered one for a major-label country record.

The follow-up came from a habit she had started at gigs. Fans were invited to write down whatever they wanted rid of and hand the paper over; she read them. let go letters, released on 16 May 2025, traces each song back to one of those letters — alcoholism, body dysmorphia, the ordinary grind of low self-esteem. Billboard named it one of the 50 best albums of 2025.

Running alongside the albums are two features that did most of the commercial work. She co-wrote and sings on Sam Barber's "Indigo" (October 2024), which reached No. 8 on Hot Country Songs, No. 40 on the Hot 100 and No. 33 in the UK, and carries RIAA platinum, ARIA double platinum and BPI gold certifications. "Dusty Bibles" with Josiah Queen followed in 2025, reaching No. 3 on Hot Christian Songs and No. 92 on the Hot 100.

An Ozzy cover, then an award

Somewhere in that run she recorded "No More Tears". Her reading of the Ozzy Osbourne song — a country singer taking on a metal record straight, without winking at it — had been widely praised by the time MusicRow wrote up her next tour in January 2026, and it is the single most-played song in her 2026 sets according to setlist.fm's tally, ahead of her own material.

The EP forgive, forget. followed on 13 March 2026, carrying the Sam Barber duet "Fear in God" and the track that now names her tour. On 28 April 2026 she was announced as New Female Artist of the Year ahead of the 61st ACM Awards ceremony, which put a trophy on a career that had been running almost entirely on streaming and word of mouth. She played the 19th ACM Honours in Nashville on 19 August 2026.

Where she stands in October 2026

The Girl of Constant Sorrow Tour was announced on 12 January 2026: eight headline dates from Bogart's in Cincinnati on 12 March to The Signal in Chattanooga on 28 March, extended through April and into May. Festival bookings filled the summer — Stagecoach on 24 April, the Lone Star Smokeout at the AT&T Stadium grounds on 26 April, Cavendish Beach in Prince Edward Island on 11 July, Bourbon & Beyond in Louisville on 26 September.

"Blood Runs Thicker" went to country radio at the end of July 2026 as the second-most-added record of the week and the most-added by a female artist. The tour named after it was announced on 29 July 2026: ten headline dates opening at The Ritz in Raleigh on 16 October and finishing at the Fillmore Silver Spring on 11 December, with Jaid Joice opening. A Grand Ole Opry House show on 11 October sits immediately before it. Thirty-four dates are currently on sale across three countries.

The jump in scale is already booked. January 2027 brings Crash My Playa in Riviera Maya, and from April she is on all twelve stadium dates of Luke Combs's My Kinda Saturday Night Tour, announced on 13 August 2026 — AT&T Stadium in Arlington on 3 April through Petco Park in San Diego on 26 June, in the round, sharing the support bill with Treaty Oak Revival, Shenandoah and Wyatt McCubbin.

The show as it stands

A current Anna set runs roughly an hour and a half with a full band. At Cedar Lake Cellars in Wright City, Missouri on 22 August 2026 she played fifteen songs between 7.15 and 8.45pm: in at "Blame It on My Broken Heart", then "Mr. Predictable", a "Love Story" cover, "Giddy Up!", "it's just rainin'" and "No More Tears", a four-part medley of "Ring of Fire", "Forever and Ever, Amen", "American Pie" and "What's Up?", then "Man Downstairs", "Ice Ice Baby", "Party in the U.S.A.", "Narcissist", "Blood Runs Thicker" and "Make It Look Easy", with Sam Barber joining for "Restless Mind" and "Indigo" to close.

The covers are not filler. Across 2026 the recurring outside songs have been "No More Tears", Taylor Swift's "Love Story", "Ice Ice Baby", Cher's "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)", "Party in the U.S.A." and Olivia Dean's "Man I Need" — a deliberately scrambled spread that lets her move between acoustic confession and something closer to a rock set within the same hour.

At the Rave in Milwaukee in May 2026 she played a 22-song set under her purple butterfly motif, with Ashley Anne opening and the letter-writing ritual still intact: slips collected before the show and read back from the stage. The crowd ran from children to middle-aged couples, and phone torches went up during "lonestar alone". The UWM Post's reviewer credited her with holding the vulnerable passages and the loud ones in the same show, and predicted she would outgrow rooms that size shortly. Onstage in Milwaukee she explained the tour title plainly: her life had changed in the blink of an eye, from driving the country in her own car to a full crew and a bus to sleep on.