Watch William Tyler thoughtfully drift from place to place, a nomad made complete by his guitar, and before you've heard even one note of his music you'll begin to feel something vast and powerful begin to stir within you. It's not easy to articulate, but it's inherently present in all of us by virtue of our existing as living, breathing, seeing, touching, loving, hurting, thinking human beings on this planet.
You can tell there's a certain weight to the world through his deeply observant eyes, but it's born from a romantic appreciation of the furthest reaches of the forgotten landscapes and open roads he's traveled as both a native southerner and a solo performer. This translates to a sound that, for me, speaks for the moments in which we feel unusual kinds of inspiration: a home-cooked meal on a night in a lonely small town, gazing up at a star-speckled sky over desert plains, or even passing by a run-down gas station in the middle of a long stretch of highway.
"Kingdom of Jones" is the latest example of this, a noodling new single that'll be included on Modern Country, out June 3rd via Merge Records. Tyler calls the upcoming project "a love letter to what we’re losing in America, to what we’ve already lost. We stand at the precipice of the twilight of empire, the decline of so many national institutions and the vanishing of certainties.”
Heavy stuff, right? You'll understand when you listen to his masterfully absorbing work.
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