Watching William Tyler play live it’s almost impossible not to be immediately pulled in; mesmerized by the melodies that unspool from the strings of his guitar and wrap themselves around the room. His songs don’t demand your attention, they ask for it and you’re only ever too happy to give it. With the release of his brilliant fourth solo album, Goes West, in January, Tyler’s audience and acclaim only seem to be growing and he gave fans new and old the chance to understand him and his music a little better when he arrived at New York’s (le) poisson rouge to bring his songs to life Tuesday evening February, 26th.
After a truly out-there opening set from drummer Ryan Sawyer and jazz horn player Daniel Carter, Tyler came to the stage and, after joking that the audience had now been well-primed for his “placid guitar instrumentals”, launched into a string of songs off his two latest records armed only with his acoustic guitar and his fingertips. The mostly seated crowd at LPR were quick to quiet as each song began, letting every subtlety in Tyler’s playing reveal itself clearly. All one had to do was close their eyes and they’d find themselves envisioning the worlds Tyler creates within the sunrise melodies of songs like “Man In a Hurry” and “Eventual Surrender”, both off Goes West. And while William Tyler is not a virtuosic guitar player in the traditional sense, the man’s formidable talent is hard to deny when you watch his right-hand cascade across the strings with surgical precision on Modern Country highlight “Gone Clear.”
Tyler also came across as more talkative than one might expect for a musician who traffics in instrumentals, telling stories between songs and joking with audience members. He described how he’d written the aforementioned “Gone Clear” the morning after a late night that featured him eating three weed cookies and a friend putting on the second side of Terrapin Station followed by Joni Mitchell’s Hejira, and joked that when people ask him what his music sounds like (“normally airport security or people I owe money”) he tells them it’s “like the mellow parts of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, but without the singing” – a not-far-off, if slightly self-deprecating assessment.
The second half of Tyler’s set saw him change out his Martin acoustic for his trusty Fender Telecaster, adorned with a Steal Your Face sticker, and delve into the headier side of his oeuvre. Diving into “We Can’t Go Home Again”, off his 2013 LP Impossible Truth, Tyler morphed the acoustic twirls of the studio version into a overwhelming world of looped guitar parts; building it up piece by piece until he had created a cacophony of reverberating lines and then knocking it all down to return to the tune’s gentle opening line. He invited up singer and guitarist Steve Gunn for assistance on fantastic versions of “Highway Anxiety,” which settled into a relaxed, warm groove in the absence of the drums that push the original, and a cover of Michael Chapman’s “Among the Trees.” Saving the best for last, Tyler brought Ryan Sawyer back out to accompany him on a fiery performance of “Whole New Dude,” off his 2014 EP Lost Colony. Tyler and Sawyer drove hard into the song’s climax, with Tyler lunging towards the drumset as he wrangled delirious, psychedelic noise from his guitar.
Tyler’s music has consistently balanced ideas of light and dark – his songs can shift from beauty to shadow and back at the drop of a hat – and seeing him live is to witness those energies come together as one. One sees where Tyler the man fits into his music, the anxieties, the humor, the thoughtfulness, and that constant reach for wild freedom.
