Mitchell Tenpenny Talks New Music, Finding Love and Planning His Wedding — or Not! 'Biggest Procrastinators'

Mitchell Tenpenny was feeling uninspired. The world was in the midst of the pandemic, and touring was off the table for the country singer and his fiancée, fellow musician Meghan Patrick. While Patrick was upstairs watching movies, Tenpenny went down to his studio and started tinkering with a new guitar riff. He jokes he has "a million" guitars, but something about holding a new one can spark an idea. He went down to Carter Vintage Guitars and bought a pre-war gut string classical guitar that he says "sounds so good."

Tenpenny went back home and started noodling on it. The noodling led to humming, which turned into a melody that became "The Way You Are," a song he wrote for Patrick on his new EP The Low Light Sessions that is available now. The song is the last on the eight-track EP, and Tenpenny wrote it alone.

"I was thinking about her upstairs watching movies," Tenpenny tells PEOPLE, remembering the day he wrote it. "I'm like, 'Man, I'm living with this person for the rest of my life, and I don't want her to change a thing."

Even though they weren't engaged yet, Tenpenny wrote the song with their wedding in mind. He imagined all the things he'd be thinking about she was walking down the aisle. When he played it for her, she cried. He proposed a few months later in the same place they met — Losers Bar & Grill in Nashville.

Patrick was dressed in camouflage and had just come down from a tree stand the first time she and Tenpenny met. She was at the bar to be a wingman for her friend, but when Tenpenny saw her straight-out-of-the-woods look, he couldn't stay away.

"It definitely wasn't love at first sight for her," the singer says of their introduction four years ago. "Seeing how pretty she was just in camouflage. It's just the disconnect between the two that intrigued me. I love the disconnects. I love it when the singer doesn't sound like the way they look in all aspects of life."

The couple is eyeing an October wedding date, but Tenpenny says they are "the biggest procrastinators" and haven't done much wedding planning. Instead, he's been focused on his new music. He has two songs on country radio at the moment — "At the End of a Bar," which is a collaboration with Chris Young, and "Truth About You." Neither title is on his The Low Light Sessions, but having two songs simultaneously on country radio allowed him more creative freedom with the EP because it didn't have to cater to mainstream norms.

The lyrically driven songs are from Tenpenny's songwriting vault and spotlight storytelling over contemporary production. The songs unfurl like the plot of a movie based on his life.

"It's everything that didn't work out, to breakups and down to finding my fiancée," Tenpenny says. "It just tells more of a story, almost like a movie from beginning to end."

Tenpenny launched the eight-song project with "Horseshoes and Hand Grenades" because the song — from which PEOPLE is sharing behind-the-scenes music video shots — sets the tone and feels like the opening scene of a film. The singer thinks he's getting close to what he wants, but he isn't quite there yet.

From there, the EP moves to songs about finding the person Tenpenny hoped to spend his life with, only to discover it wasn't a good match. He wrote "Mama Raised the Hell Out of Me" with Jaren Johnston and Zach Kale for his mother, who has always been his biggest believer. "Don't Make Me Choose" was inspired by trying to balance his personal life with his career as a country singer.

"It's like your career started to happen, but you think you're in love with somebody, and they're making you battle between both loves," Tenpenny says. "It's the love of your career or the love of someone else."

The EP culminates with Patrick's "The Way You Are" when he knows he has found the woman he wants to spend the rest of his life with.

"I want to like make sure that the songs feel like a puzzle all the way to the end," Tenpenny says. "If they listen all the way through, they see what's happened in the last five years. People can find their story in it, but it's definitely mine."