How a DNA Test Made Country Singer Tanner Adell a ‘Whole New Person’ (Exclusive)

• Tanner Adell released the single “Going Blonde” on Friday, March 28
• The song is about her biological mother, who died before she ever had the chance to meet her
• Adell opened up about her family dynamics in a series of Instagram videos

Country star Tanner Adell is opening up about “Going Blonde,” her most personal single yet, and the surprising family backstory that inspired it.

Adell, 24, has always been open with her fans about the fact that she was adopted, and grew up in southern California with four siblings, all of whom were also adopted.

But in a series of Instagram videos shared this week, Adell revealed there was more to the story, including the fact that she has a brother she never knew about and that her biological mother died years before she ever had the chance to meet her.

The deeply personal story — and her bio mom’s Dolly Parton-esque blonde hair — ultimately led Adell to write “Going Blonde” nearly four years ago, and she shared it with the world as a single on Friday, March 28.

“I’ve been really intentional with how I wanted to put this song out,” Adell told PEOPLE at the GLAAD Media Awards on Thursday, March 27. “I wrote it almost four years ago when I was going through a process of my birth family finding me, and me finding out some truths that I wasn’t expecting, and I kind of had to become a whole new person through that.”

Adell’s journey of family discovery began several years ago, when her parents got her an AncestryDNA kit for Christmas. Around the same time, she learned that her birth mother had been married with children, and Adell was the result of an affair, which is why she was music adoption. She wound up finding her biological father on Facebook, and the two began speaking somewhat regularly.

But several years later, AncestryDNA helped connect her someone she believed to be her half-brother, as they shared the same mother.

“It turns out he had been looking for me for most of his life and had tried literally every DNA test he could get his hands on,” she said in her Instagram video. “I had never seen someone that looked like me… It was amazing.”

Before long, Adell and her brother realized that, based on data provided by AncestryDNA, they actually were not half-siblings, but full siblings, and their mother must have “mistakenly assumed” that the singer was the result of her affair. It was around this time that Adell learned her mother had died five years before her brother was able to find her.

He did have a picture to share, though, and Adell was struck by how much her mother looked like Dolly Parton. With that, she began a deep dive into Parton’s career, as she felt it was “the only way I could see my mom alive.” She discovered Parton’s 1967 song “Dumb Blonde,” and realized that the blonde hair she’d had since childhood (which had faded to brown upon moving to Nashville) was a special way of connecting with her late mother.

“I started to realize how blonde hair felt like protection from my mom. It felt like she’s there with me,” Adell said on Instagram. “And that was when I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going blonde.’ I made my first-ever hair coloring appointment and I got my hair done.”

The moving ballad, which was written solely by Adell, features lyrics about what she imagines her mother to be like, from lavender-scented shampoo to clear blue eyes, all the while knowing that it’s just a fantasy.

“Grief is not easy, and it’s something that I feel like we don’t talk about as much as we should, and people don’t know how to cope with it when it comes along,” she told PEOPLE. “When it does happen, it can be fast and it can be shocking. But just knowing that there are so many people that go through things like this, I am one of them and I’m hoping this song can be a help for someone.”

The “Buckle Bunny” singer added that she’s been focusing on “the light at the end of the tunnel,” and has leaned into songwriting as a way of expressing herself.

“I think a lot of me has healed, as painful as it is sometimes to talk about,” she said. “I feel like I’ve healed enough that it seems like it’s okay now for me to give it to others. I was nervous at first. It’s such a big part of my heart to put it out. But if you read the comments, there are so many stories, and that’s really what this song is. It’s a story of my life, but it’s for anybody that feels like they’ve lost someone. You keep anything you can to try to keep them close to you.”

She also heaped praise on the parents who raised her, saying they did an “amazing job.”

“I was very eccentric as a child and I love my tutus and my crowns and my little plastic heels from Claire’s. And they never tried to squash that. They’ve always supported me and pushed me to do what I dreamed about doing,” she said. “My adopted dad taught me who the Black divas were in disco and jazz, and that was how he raised me. It was passed down to me, and I feel like he’s a big reason of why I felt like I could do this.”