Nashville guitar wizard William Tyler’s new album, Time Indefinite, is a pretty special effort; we met up with him to dig a bit deeper into it.
To me, William Tyler’s 2019 album Goes West feels like something of a turning point in his career, almost like a swansong to traditional guitar music. “That was a conscious attempt to make a record for the mainstream folk audience,” William explains. “It’s a good record and I’m really proud of the compositions, but it didn’t really cross over into that crowd. That was a big reason why, with this new stuff, I was just like, fuck it, I’ll go completely in the other direction.”
We’ll come onto Time Indefinite in a moment, but a significant detail is that last year William booked recording space at The Tank in Rangely, Colorado, an enormous disused water tower, where he re-recorded Goes West solo, using just the tank’s acoustics as backing. The resulting album, New Myths, was intended as a tour piece, but the new direction felt significant. “Goes West was too busy,” William says. “It was cool and I’m proud of what we did, it’s just that I wanted a version of those songs that wasn’t that. I thought the record could stand on its own in the new age ambient territory. It’s a fascinating place, in the middle of fucking nowhere and it has some of the most insane reverb, as crazy as any cathedral.”
Time Indefinite is a very different album to anything William has done before, and, although there are hints at the direction on New Vanitas, this feels more focused, which is perhaps surprising, considering the lack of a concrete theme. “With Goes West and Modern Country I had an idea of what I wanted it to be, thematically,” he says. “This didn’t start out like that, it was more home recordings, patchwork stuff and messing around with textures without trying to add too much. And this was all post-lockdown, so a lot of it is that, and I started working with this guy Jake Davis, who co-produced the record. I was back in Nashville for lockdown and I didn’t have much gear, not even a multi-track recorder, but Jake and I started recording a bunch of stuff.”
Around this time, as lockdown was ending, William began throwing ideas around with Kieran Hebden of Four Tet, but soon realised that this was a different project to what he and Kieran had in mind (watch this space for more news on that collaboration) and decided to use this “pot of ingredients” as a solo record. “It was starting to reflect what I was listening to and the mood I was in,” William explains. “It was sitting in this particular zone, where it was rooted enough in guitar music or melodic consonants, and I started treating the pieces as stand alone and decided to finish them.”
The set is ace and William’s most diverse yet, with each song bringing a different idea, but it still took some time to become an official album. “The last song on the record is called Held, but the working title was Held Chords,” William explains. “It’s because it was literally me improvising on acoustic and running it through this old 80s delay unit like what [Brian] Eno would have used. It has this weird hold function and that was it, we just had five minutes of that and I decided we should add this very on the nose melodic coda to it that had some movement. It felt quite sentimental and I said it should be the last track on the album. Then Jake turns to me and says ‘have we been making an album this whole time?’ And I was like ‘well, yeah…’ It was a scattered, multi-year process.”
Interestingly, to my ears, there is plenty of positivity running through Time Indefinite, which perhaps surprises William. “Well that’s good,” he smiles. “But I was in a very messy place mentally when making this record. This year I’m focused on these new projects, but I’m also rebuilding my life, which has been a very humbling process. So there’s a lot of sad but romantic nostalgia there and maybe that does sound hopeful at times, but it’s definitely not forward thinking. The consonants in the stuff that sounds hopeful or positive probably is – it’s not all depressing – but it’s from a place of nostalgia. I’m not usually a very nostalgic person, but there were times during lockdown when I wondered, is there a future? So we might as well romanticise the past…”
It’s clear that a lot of effort, energy and thought went into the making of Time Indefinite and it feels like a key album in the William Tyler catalogue. “Yeah, it feels pretty important,” he nods. “It’s definitely the most personal record I’ve ever made and it’s weird, because I have mixed feelings about letting go of it. I don’t mean for that to sound pretentious, but it is time-stamped with a few years of my life that have been very difficult, and I appreciate that about it. So, yeah, it does feel important… I have no fucking idea where I’m gonna go from here, I’ll tell you that!”
William Tyler Tour Dates
Wed. May, 7 – Kingston, NY @ Tubby’s
Thu. May 8 – Keene, NH @ Nova Arts
Fri. May 9 – Arundel, ME @ Vinegar Hill Music Theatre
Sat. May 10 – Somerville , MA @ Warehouse XI
Sun. May 11 – Fairfield, CT @ Stage One
Tue. May 13 – Brooklyn, NY @ National Sawdust
Wed. May 14 – Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s
Thu. May 15 – Washington, DC @ Songbyrd
Fri. May 16 – Roanoke, VA @ The Spot on Kirk
Sat. May 17 – Chattanooga, TN @ Cherry Street Tavern
Sun. May 18 – Atlanta, GA @ The Garden Club
Wed. June 4 – London UK @ ICA