Studio C209: Born In A Prison Cell

A man with a twisted past, Tenneson has spent over 40 years in prison where he has had the time to mature and grow as a person - and a musician. His new album expresses his remorse, compassion, and deep commitment to justice.

Studio C209: Born in a Prison Cell is exactly what it sounds like. Every song on this album was written, composed, and recorded inside a prison cell.

Michael Tenneson, who performs simply as Tenneson, is currently serving five life sentences in Colorado for murdering five people in 1987 during two drug fueled robberies. He has spent over forty years incarcerated. His crimes were violent and devastating. The harm he caused is real and permanent, and it will follow him for the rest of his life. That truth sits at the center of Studio C209.

Known to many through his work as the bandleader of the incarcerated group Territorial, Tenneson is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, singer, and songwriter who has spent years building music programs inside prison. With instruments donated through FREER Records’ Instruments Into Prisons initiative, including a Korg Triton from alt country singer Dougie Poole, Tenneson slowly constructed a small recording studio inside his cell, number C209.

Across seven songs, Tenneson wrestles with remorse, accountability, compassion, and justice. A man who has done deep work on himself while in prison, the humanitarian side of Tenneson shines on Studio C209. If Springsteen’s seminal DIY record Nebraska is a study on killers like Charles Starkweather, Studio C209 is Starkweather forty years later if he had rehabilitated and told his own story.

Some of these songs are rockers, and some will make you cry – like “The Father’s Call,” a true story about Tenneson’s detail as a singer for inmates on the Dementia Ward. “I saw a man with dementia today / for years too long he’d had nothing to say,” Tenneson sings. As the song goes on, the song-within-the-song inspires the man with dementia to utter the first words he’d spoken in months.

In the lead single, “Nobody’s Listening,” Tenneson reflects on how desensitized to violence we have become as a society, while “there is so much to live for / so much more that we could embrace,” he sings. The challenge lies in us coming together as a community – “if we just lift our heads up, and look into each other’s face.”

None of the album’s seven songs ask for pity or even forgiveness, but they show how a man who has caused deep harm can grow as a person and hold up a mirror to society from inside a dark place.

Musically, the album reflects Tenneson’s range as a composer and performer. Playing multiple instruments and recording the album himself, he blends rock, folk, country gospel, and stripped-down storytelling into songs carried by raw emotion and deeply introspective lyricism. These are reflections from someone who has spent forty years sitting with the consequences of his past.

Studio C209: Born In A Prison Cell joins a long and complicated lineage of prison music. From early prison blues recordings to Johnny Cash’s historic concerts at Folsom and San Quentin, prisoner-musicians and visitors like Cash have long used music to confront incarceration. Tenneson’s record holds its own in that tradition.