William Tyler :: “TIme Indefinite”
Cover Art: Sam Smith
As one Tennessean to another, William Tyler has always, in my mind, represented this tonal treasure of cosmic complexity. While remaining a radical figure riddled with rare resistance to the torturous existence we all face from time to time, Tyler seemed to shapeshift with the times while simultaneously conquering the questionable qualities artists have to adopt along their journey for better or worse. If you admire Tyler’s work as much as we do, then there’s no need to dig up his poetic past as we put one foot in front of the other to properly explore and expand on the musician’s most recent effort entitled “Time Indefinite.” A brilliant and quickly transcended cast of songs that effortlessly echo that familiar tone that Tyler is so adorned for, but where the album sincerely speaks from is a place of perfect pain, and legendary latitudes rich with perseverance, and an overall eagerness to express the harmonious connection to the human spirit. His first solo album in five years, “Time Indefinite,” is a “mental illness record. It’s music about losing your mind but not wanting to, about trying to come back, says Tyler. A tender testament to how much the musician has overcome these past years, what we’re hearing is a declaration of ultimate hope.
Photo: Angelina Castillo
While remaining hopeful and seeking salvation high and low, the album explores a core value in the human condition that artists either take for granted or don’t seem to sit with long enough. The swirling struggles that break us up into multiple pieces, like ancient seashell particles captured in the shoreline on a beach, Tyler scatters his artistic attention across the universe just as his contemporaries have in past lives. By no means is this just a ‘pandemic album,’ and while that term is perfectly harmless to categorize one’s work, the pandemic, for most people, only expanded on the personal crises by prolonging isolation, anxiety, mental health, financial failure, and existential dread. “Time Indefinite,” set for release this Friday, the 25th, on North Carolina-based label Psychic Hotline, acts as a romantic gesture towards the dystopian future, and all its pulverizing politics that were here long before the reign of the 2020s. Returning to Nashville during the global crisis, Tyler found himself in a familiar place in the south without the majority of his instruments or tools to help guide and coax him into a creative chaos. While on a family trip to Jackson, MS in November 2020, after the passing of his late grandfather, Tyler inherited an old tape machine that was well preserved amongst his findings, which played an incredible part in the musician’s journey to carefully call on the stars in the southern sky to help guide him to a precious place to create something meaningful in a time of complete despair.
“Carl Jung used the term ‘anima’ to refer to the unconscious divine feminine within the man. So often in romantic love, we are seeking both the magical other and, if anything, the mirror to align with the different parts of our psyche that we project. I imagine this as kind of like a love song I wrote to different people, all of us having to stay at one of those middle-of-nowhere airport motels awaiting a flight to be rescheduled.”
Photo: Jacob Blickenstaff
Casting various tape loops and lysergic layers into the eager ether of space and time, Tyler summoned something universally unique with the help of longtime friend Jacob Davis across the album’s nine tracks of blistering bliss. From the faulty foundation of a severed soul to the radiating sunsets stretched across the atmospheric horizon, the album’s ability to awaken the spirit in confidence is exactly why the musician is the sonic staple he is. ”I am here, and things are hard and wonderful, and I am still here,” says Tyler, and this is something everyone can relate to, as this radical roster of songs plugs us into the cosmic community of critical change and connection. With tracks such as “Concern,” the album’s oscillating opener “Cabin Six,” and “Anima Hotel,” what we ultimately get from Tyler is this jiving journalistic approach to the times and conditions as to how we’re living, and ultimately what we’re standing up against. A communicative cast of bewildering ballads that endlessly reflect complex emotion, listeners can expect a harmonious home run/homecoming album for the times to set us free from spring and into the sacred sorcery of summer. Thank God for William Tyler.
