I’m from rural West Georgia. It’s there; it exists. If you go outside of I285, past Thornton Road, past “the suburbs”, past Douglasville for another 45 minutes- almost to the Alabama border- approximately at the line where people start to wave at you when you drive by, it’s right there.

There are some things I love about the south. I love the food, the warmness of people, how everything is familiar, how the trees and grass are super green in the summer. I love the slowness, the time and space to watch a cloud pass all the way across the big blue sky. I love the south. I truly love the south.
I also hate the south. I hate the arrogance, the small town bickering, the constant question “what would the neighbors think?”, the bad education, the popularity of Fox News, the “fuck you” pick up trucks, the tendency for people to think “things cain’t get much worse off.” I hate the south. I truly hate the south.

It is what my great great great grandfathers and grandmothers left for me in their will. They left me a bad stomach, a big nose, decent vocal chords and a plot of dirt. I carry them inside of me like a blueprint- like a foregone conclusion. There’s even a road that cuts through a trailer park somewhere near where I grew up that my grand pa paid to be named “Tyler Lane” (in honor of my birth). The first song I remember learning was “Honky Tonk Man” by Dwight Yoakam. My dad was the minister of music at my country Methodist church. I know the cemetery where I will be buried- right next to the patch of woods where my second cousin was killed by her boyfriend for getting pregnant- near the jail I spent a night in for breaking into the public pool.

When I go home now and see the Glenn Beck Show saved on my parent’s DVR or I run into an old classmate who is selling insurance, I’m reminded that this was my course. The fate that awaited my grandfather after the military, the fate that awaited my dad after getting cut from his New York acting school, the Christ Haunted South of hard work, Sunday lunch, and hard deaths is my fate. It’s what the Oracle told me as a child. It’s the warning I see on every back street and on the tongue of every small town preacher in my home town. “This is where you belong” is the word from Delphi.

I am Oedipus. I ran from the ghost to live in the underground dives of Paris. I have a subscription to the New Yorker. I graduated college with a degree in Philosophy. I love the European Novel. I love Dvořák, Mahler, Beethoven and Liszt. I’m a Humanist. I get my news from the BBC, my beer from Belgium, and religious instruction from 4th Century Greece- and despite this heresy, this intentional avoidance of The Ghost, I am my father’s son.

I went home last weekend to help my grandfather cut grass and to hang out with my parents. Once a month there’s a sort of variety show about 20 minutes outside of Carrollton at the Lowell Opry House- which is a beautiful converted airplane hanger in the middle of nowhere. I’ve never been, though I’m sure my dad has invited me to every single one.

The format is like this: there are two sets, both are opened by an original act. The main feature is a band that plays mostly old country songs and members of the audience who can sing those songs get on stage and sing with the band. I knew about 2/3 of the songs (i am my father’s son), and they were all executed beautifully. The pedal steel player is about 80 and has played for every decent country band between 1960-1985. 98% of his licks are perfect but the other 2% are so incredibly off it’s almost a masterpiece. The keyboard player is blind and makes the joke “it’s nice to see all of y’all here tonight.” My mom was asking the band leader why he (the piano player) never brought his girlfriend around and the band leader responded, “well Deborah, she’s just a damn whore.”

The median age of the crowd is probably 50, but the music is so good. It’s exactly just so. It’s the predictable jokes, the showmanship of someone who has seen a life time of honkey tonks. There’s no awareness, no pretensions, no winks and nods. It’s not like Southern Comfort (a trucker bar just outside of Atlanta) that’s becoming a new hip place to hang out. It’s not hip. I don’t even think it knows what that word means. It’s families and hard working men and women with no need to qualify their life or their music. They’ve never listened to anything besides Country radio, but they don’t self-identify with it either, because in rural West Georgia, it’s not a conscious choice. It just is. Anyway, they were gracious enough to let me play four songs and were so kind afterwards. “It’s not country, but it’s not bad.” One of the singers and I were talking outside. He asked if my friends would make fun of the event if they came. My response was “No, because it’s good.” While this is probably at least half true, I really wonder what my friends would think. I wonder about my generation’s (and my own) fascination with cheese, with kitch, with irony, with authenticity. I wonder about its value.

I forget sometimes in the coffee shops and galleries and bars in Atlanta that the Deep South- the scary south- the “rural” south is my inheritance. I spent 18 solid years being unable to abstract myself from where I grew up. When I was in Paris, I thought about the Deep South in the same way an anthropologist would think about a tribe in Africa. One night after playing a show at the Troubadour in London, a British fellow came up to me and said “I like your songs- I had no idea that was what music sounded like in the American South.” I thought the comment was funny because I was listening to so much David Gray and Damien Rice at the time and the music I was making then was completely non-descript of time or place. It made me realize how much I wanted to be from the south, how much I wanted to own the rich traditions and melodies. That night in London was a turning point. Last weekend in Carroll County was a turning point. I don’t have to self-identify with the south, but I can be a rightful participant in the grand tradition of music and art that’s still more or less unbroken.

I am my father’s son. This curse is also a sort of cure. I won’t be voting for Sarah Palin in ‘12, nor will I trade my hatchback for a pick-up truck any time soon, but I will dust off some Dwight Yoakam and some Conway Twitty. I’ll make a country/blues record. I’ll hold my tongue when the old folks start talking about the rapture. I’ll remember that having all the answers doesn’t mean quite so much as being a good person and loving people more than yourself. These are the things I’ll teach my children, and I’ll take them to the country to visit their grandparents who will also teach them these things, because that’s how families work in the south-an entire history of foregone conclusions. I am my father’s son.

Currently, I’m listening to a remixed version of “A Baptism” by a Seattle producer/ new friend of mine. I’m sitting in Paul Reeve’s subterranean studio waiting for him to put his two year old daughter to bed so that I can keep tracking on my new project with him. Ever since I got back from Canada, life has been moving very fast. Lots of fun opportunities like the Southern Trails Tour with Channing & Quinn, Jeremy Aggers, and my old friend Chelsea Lynn LaBate, the release of my new double EP (one sweet/one sour) in August, stepping into a leadership role with the ATL Collective, and a few bigger things I’m hesitant to talk about right now. Life is at a frenzy. I don’t have time to read the books I like or the records that are my healing, or go to the blues bars in Atlanta. My calm is replaced by frenzy, but right now, I’m very happy.

There is a balm in Gilead. There is an inland island.

I have no profound thoughts to agitate you with today, except that I’m profoundly thankful for my life- for my friends- for eyes that see and ears that hear- for hidden beauty that has to be sought after. Louis C.K. says “Everything is perfect, and no one is happy.” As cynical as I am, I’m incurably amazed by this world- by you dear reader- by the generosity of complete strangers- by spring reverb and Telefunkin microphones- and by how the world is brighter when the kitchen’s clean.

Nothing but love for now guys. and hopefully some good news I can share soon.

best

tyler

I don’t want your money. I want to throw a party and release a flashy, artistic limited run of two EPs that I’m currently recording. I’m not panhandling. If you don’t give, it doesn’t make a difference as far as the release of the final project. If you do give, you get a special, super limited pressing of an album that’s really good (and only for Atlantans), and you get all the booze you care to drink at a party at my house. I feel like this is a way to go the extra mile in a way that’s fair and appealing to everyone.

Approx cost of throwing the party=$350

Approx cost of art/poster/CD duplication=$650

I feel like $20 is well worth that.

These are the songs being recorded:

1.Unbearable Lightness (Or Else I’ll Float Away)
2.Nashville (Paperbacks/Box of Wine)
3.Parry Sound (Two Islands)
4.She Dreams in Colour (Eve’s Love Song)
5.Love Story

1.It’s Fun To Do Bad Things
2.I Can Get In Trouble On My Own
3.One Legged Woman
4.Pretty Lady and the Pearly Gates
5.Whiskey is a Medicine (Promised Land)

titles might change, but the songs won’t.

Also, there’s a dirty little secret. If you’re not in Atlanta, and still want to help out, donate, and I’ll make sure you get enough goodies to make it more than worth your while.

Love all around.

tyler

To create is to speak something out of nothing. However, there is nothing new under the sun. We are the sublimation of both of these truths.

I watched Twilight: Eclipse yesterday (of my own free will and without irony). The first Twilight movie was a mediocre story told in a mediocre way with long dialogues of the most drony, pathetic melodrama I’ve ever sat through, but the production value of the movies has steadily gone up with each new movie. Every vampire/werewolf story has its own mythology. You have to create new rules for the universe you’re creating. How do you kill the creatures? Sunlight? Can they fly? Then I realized that the story isn’t really about vampires and warewolfs at all.  The story is Bella (the main character played by Kristen Stewart) creating a mythology for herself- the same way any teenager would over-dramatize their relationships (the good guy versus the dangerous guy/ holding to traditional values versus breaking them). When I think about the supernatural elements (vampires and werewolves) as a metaphor for myth creation, I think about David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive (don’t shoot me). What I mean by that is that the story isn’t in the myth she creates, she herself is the myth- there are no other characters except those inside of her (ie Jacob and Edward and Victoria are only dialogues in her head).

We are all our haphazardly put together myths. We get tattoos of lyrics we like or words from books we like or pictures to remind us of where we’re from. We obsess over what our facebook profile says about us. Consciously or not, we all want to make interesting (or at least coherent) myths about ourselves- ie what it meant for a parent to die or a lover to leave or to spend a year abroad or to make a project or to have a powerful dream.

The phrase “this is a poorly written myth” popped into my head while watching Twilight- and then I realized “we are all just writers of poorly written myth.” The themes are the same- from Oedipus to Batman to Zombies to Friday Night Lights to Edward and Bella. This afternoon I came across this statement that I think secures all my wandering thoughts together. “We do not claim to show how men think in myths, but how myths think themselves in men, and without their knowledge…Myths think themselves among themselves” says Claude Lévi-Strauss

In this way, nothing is “new”- the themes are all the same, but the way these themes work themselves out is the great work of entropy. We are self creating creatures, it’s the only think by definition (Sartre’s definition anyway) we are.

Here is a strange passage from Hesse’s “Demian” I read Tuesday:

“We always define the limits of our personality too narrowly. In general, we count as part of our personality only that which we can recognize as being an individual trait or as diverging from the norm. But we consist of everything the world consists of, each of us, and just as our body contains the genealogical table of evolution as far back as the fish and even much further, so we bear everything in our soul that once was alive in the soul of men. Every god and devil that ever existed, be i among the Greeks, Chinese, or Zulus, are written within us as latent possibilities, as whishes, as alternatives.”

You can read this post in one of two ways- 1. me wrestling with thoughts that I don’t have a huge emotional connection to or 2. a cry for help to friends in Grant Park who should be at my house with me listening to records in the middle of a summer day instead of allowing me to read by myself (too much german romanticism IS bad for you).

-tyler

Education is important up to the point in which you understand that you have sole personal control over the things you think about, and the way in which you think about them. I have no use in an education that wants to teach me more definitions to words.

The important sort of education is the kind you can learn from hanging out with old people, or living by a river, or facing hardships, or opening up your eyes in the morning and really deciding to see the world. It’s not a secret knowledge. It’s the opposite. It’s the most ordinary, mundane truth I can try to express to you.  It’s the totally free and unhindered opportunity (responsibility) humans have to orient themselves to their world in the ways they choose. I’m not talking about circumstances. There is a huge level of fate/dumb chance involved in day to day living, but that has no bearing on how you respond to that.Your mind is your own an no one else’s.

My gripe is that I can’t talk about certain ideas without people shifting the debate into some sort of political discussion. I love ideas, and I think that reflection leads to its own glorious end when taken all the way, but i hate politics. Politics are the lazy man’s metaphysics. It’s adopting a blanket ideology 1. in a world where ideology has been killed and buried (zizek) and 2. without there being any need for you to have a blanket ideology in the first place. Whatever happened to being a human being? Whatever happened to looking out your window and framing your world view from what you see, rather than framing what you see through your world view?

Isms and Ology-s can fight with each other till Judgment Day (T2 scene 1) for all i care, but put an ism or an ology next to a person- a real live living person, the ism and ology can’t even exist. They are so meaningless that a ‘me’ or ‘you’ or ‘him’ or ‘her’ trump every ‘ology’ or ‘ism’ or ‘anity’ we can think up. I’m not arguing for humanism. I’m arguing for loving the person in front of you first- before you make them fit some category because then it’s easier for you to discount them for being uninformend or homeless or young or old or black or rich or a republican or an athiest.

It’s a miracle that we’re even here in the first place. Anything added on top of existence and it’s just toppings. Take away the toppings- there’s still something. Take away something- you’ve got what you started with.

I’m not saying not to pick your battles. Fight for injustice, always, have opinions about border control or terrorism or controlled substances, but for goodness sakes, don’t let that define who you are. There’s no need to self identify with a political party. Why do we even feel that desire? That’s completely lazy and it’s not interesting at all. There are opinions about homelessness and then there are people at the soup kitchen- and Fox News and the Huffington Post are on the team of opinions trying to convert you to their team.

If you’re feeling a little foolish, try this with me. Close your eyes ( not yet- at the end of the sentence or else you won’t know what to do) and open them, if what you see is a miracle, then smile and be glad, but if not, keep repeating that until it is.

The English word “reason” comes from the Latin “ratio” (Spanish “razon” French “rasion”) which brings to mind this pairing between what is, and an ideal of what could be (in other words something not based in reality but in idealized forms). The German word is “grund” which means “ground” or “bottom” which is a much better place to start. If perfection is in terms of an ideal, then I don’t want it. I want the perfection that starts with the ground. I don’t believe in reason, but I do believe in ground.

G.W.F Hegel (a German) said ” All that is real is rational. All that is rational is real.” I’m trying to say that there is peace in that- that thought should start at the ground, and become personalized from there- not start with an ism and then sift out every particle that doesn’t fit. Ground then Up. Start the other way and you’ll always be walking on air.

All that to say- for the love friends- stop talking about “politics” and lead a good life. Whether “things get better” isn’t a question about the Fed, or of the Obama Administration, it’s a question of personal spiritual integrity and fighting (constantly) to see with a proper set of eyes.

Love love, all the way round

tyler

(side note: I don’t speak Latin or German- these conclusions of “raitio” and “grund” are based on a discussion with my friend Dustin who does and an observation about Idealism in “Immortality” by Milan Kundera)

I was in school (college maybe?)- learning the secrets of lyric, melody, and all the dark arts of creation. My teacher was Paul Simon. He was a half-cheerful, half-serious 60 something teaching a small class of five or six. [Switch to real life for a second]: The ATL Collective is covering Paul Simon’s Graceland on August 3rd, and I’m stepping into the role that David Berkeley currently occupies as organizer, hustler, logistics, singer of songs (along w/ Micah Dalton).

[Ok back to the dream]:

I knew that it would be a great surprise (and show good leadership with The Collective) to have Paul Simon come and cover his own album. So I said, “Mr. Simon, how do you feel about people asking you to play publically even though you don’t have to now?” He said, “I don’t like the public.” Then I explained what the ATL Collective is and that we are covering his album. Right before he agreed to play, my alarm went off and I had to meet David Berkeley for a breakfast meeting.

I spent a week at a cottage in Ontario to write and record songs. I don’t believe in ideological systems on principle (i hope you catch the irony in that), but on the banks of Niagara Falls two weeks ago, I was very proud of myself for coming up with  some new self-interested methods for evaluating and creating art. I was writing a little “how to” guide in my head concerning 19th Century German Romanticism and writing folk songs- that is until I collided with a car just outside of the international toll bridge. In a second my self satisfied reflections disappeared into the sinkhole in the air and my brain was completely rewired to deal with Crisis. “awareness” “consciousness” “self” all took on different properties that could neither be examined or understood in that moment. A≠A

The lead singer of the Judies, former Java Lords employee, and general strange/nice guy Warren Ullom was sentenced this week to 20 years in prison for his involvement in the death of someone I don’t know. I met Warren for the first time in 2006 (maybe 2007) when The Judies played with Ponderosa at Compound in West Midtown. He’s a figure in the underground world of the dirty Atlanta art/music subculture who’s nexus is Little Five Points, and he’s well known by folks who wade in those waters. I’m a folk singer songwriter, not an indie rocker, so our paths have rarely crossed, but on April 1st I opened an ASCAP showcase at Smith’s Olde Bar of which The Judies were the headliners.

The story briefly goes like this: Warren was shooting heroin with some girl. The girl ODed and Warren tried to revive her by giving her cocaine (which he got from a friend who came over). The cocaine failed to wake her, and the friend who brought it called the ambulance, but failed to give the correct address. Warren, scared of arrest and on heroin, waited too late to call the authorities and the girl died. He was charged this week with voluntary manslaughter and will spend a long time behind bars.

When I have discussions about this with people who don’t know Warren, they say that he is a terrible person- that he’s getting what he deserves (this is how older people who watch lots of television news think- generally). When I talk to people that know Warren, they say what a great person he is and how terrible the prosecutors are for giving him so much time (these are people who are either ambivalent or spiteful toward Rachel (the victim) because it was somehow her fault that Warren is now in trouble). However, in real life, the events of the night were awful. The facts are only “the facts” in retrospect. We can build a big edifice of ideas and opinions on any subject matter, but what we can’t ever do is to understand how the fundamental nature of the universe is reworked inside the human brain in moments of crisis.

It happend; it was a tragedy. However , we should always be mindful not to judge folks too much. “Good” people and “Bad” people don’t exist the same way my grandparents would like to believe. We don’t know what each other has won or lost in life. We don’t know the battles of the strangers we meet, and if, in moments of crisis, we don’t understand ourselves, how can we begin to pretend to understand another and be so bold with our conclusions? A≠A
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. – Karl Marx

In non-crisis news, I’m returning to the studio at the end of the month with my good friend Paul Reeves in Athens to record six new songs. Then I’m recording a six song Country/Blues EP with Joel Siebel here in Atlanta. I plan to combine these with a live show at my house in August and release an all new 20 song project (3  EPs in 1) in September. Now for a trip to Country Kookin’ and Milan Kundera.

-tyler

For those folks who aren’t from the Atlanta area, Eddie’s Attic is one of the premier singer songwriter folk venues in the country. It’s where lots of folks you listen to on the radio have been discovered, and it’s a stage where anyone in that world worth his or her salt has played (and probably still continues to play). They have an open mic on Mondays which is a stop on tour for musicians on the road, and it’s always a fun night. There are usually around 16-20 performers. Now, I disagree fundamentally in the idea of a “competition” between artists, but I did win, so I guess it sort of invalidates my criticisms seeing that I participated in it and all. So, the winner moves on to a special competition held twice a year. When you put a bunch of good (some pro, some prodigy) musicians in a room, a lot of the time it comes down to a preference in genre (string band versus acoustic soul versus bob dylan versus jason mraz). Anywho, long story short, I won the special competition. It was a huge honor, and the musicians were wonderful and there were six or seven acts that could have easily beaten me.

I got a prize of $1,000 which was/is being spent on framing three prints from Yeehaw Industries I got in Knoxville, fixing my iPod, and getting my bike back in working order. The rest goes to some evil petroleum company (other than BP), to paying my friends back for the food they’ve picked up in the past, and to rent.

I was also presented with one of those huge check looking things from Video Copy Services offering me 1,000 CDs duplicated w/ artwork, so I might be putting out some songs sooner than I thought.

Thank you wonderful folks for your support. After the competition, and after the interviews and the shaking hands, someone came up to me and said “hey- don’t quit your day job. seriously that was great.” Not knowing how to take that, I smiled and said thank you.

I’m playing on the Atlanta NBC station’s morning show on Friday. If anyone is interested in tuning in, I would advise against waking up at 6:30 am (because nothing is enjoyable in the world then) and instead, DVR it and watch it at 8pm.

Saturday is the Lazarus Benefit Show. It’s with the Vandoors and Kevin Albertini at the Trinity Anglican Mission just north of downtown off Howell Mill Road at 8 pm. Lazarus is a project led by my friend Allison Mitchell that has been her burden of love for the people of Atlanta for the past nine years, and within the past three, has been sponsoring major events for the homeless throughout the city to provide haircuts, free medical care, job counseling, and a thousand other things. I don’t know of anyone with more compassion and verve, nor anyone better suited for the task that she’s undertaken. It’s a worthwhile event, and you’re sure to meet some friendly people. It’s $10 and all money goes to Lazarus

I am humbled that life has seen me fit to give me good things. I’m trying to learn how to be a good citizen of that life. My talented and friendly roommate Brett says “things could always be better, and things could always be worse.” While I suppose that’s true, I don’t see things like that very often. I think that all the wretched painful, blissful ecstatic, mundane ordinary colors of life imply a certain perfection. Not that it is perfect in an ideal since, but that because it exists, it is perfect. Goethe says “So, waiting, I have won from you the end: God’s presence in each element.”

Yesterday I ran across a poem by Rumi that spoke stillness into my marrow and framed this thought in a more comprehensive way:

The Path

The path to truth

Is not for the sake of avoiding entanglement with the world

No, it is because nothing exists but God. (Mathnawi 3497)

I wish you lots of good things on this sunny Monday.

Also, if you came to Eddie’s and didn’t get a CD (because I didn’t bring enough), there are CDs at Criminal Records in Little 5 Points, on iTunes, on my website, and at the show Saturday.

Best,

Tyler

Much has happened in the last few weeks. I spend a restorative 9 days, alone in a cottage on Lake Huron writing songs and recording demos. I recorded 15 songs in all. I’d forgotten how wonderful life without e-mail can be.

24 is a strange age. All the friends you made in your late teens and early 20’s are beginning to do well what they set out to do. Friends are getting good jobs, jobs with responsibility, they’re traveling the world photographing Middle Eastern Royalty or working in television or working in midtown high-rises. The world is expanding for them, and because you are their friend, for you too. Recently, some fun opportunities have come my way- licensing my songs to film, making a music video, making better contacts with people in the music world who are excited to help- and it forces me to re-evaluate my motivations for all of this. What is my chief goal?

To have fun, to do good in the world, and to one day have music be financially sustainable so that I can have a family without putting them through hardships because of it- these are the goals.

Then another important question is posed- if someone wanted to brand you and sell you off to a world of money and power and fame, what conditions would you place on that? (and let’s assume that, for arguments sake, this is possible)

I’ve had the worst jobs of anyone I know (and was thankful for having them). I’ve been an Indian on the side of the highway, holding signs to advertise apartment complexes. I’ve swept parking lots daily at 6am. I’ve laid sod, delivered hamburgers, installed mobile homes. In terms of “having things,” my lifestyle has never been extravagant. In terms of having people, my life is rich beyond measure. I don’t have any commentary for popular culture. I don’t actively participate in it. I don’t watch its television or read its books or care about the players within it. I don’t go to it to add anything of value to my life (except for cinema). I realize that this doesn’t make me unique or original, and I don’t care about being either of those things. I care about people and I care about my student loans and traveling. I would sell out in a heartbeat if it would allow me to buy my sister an art studio or create a record label for my talented Atlanta musician friends or pay off my parent’s debt. If it happens and I make a radio pop album, know that I have a back catalog of at least 200 sentimental and twisted songs that I’m happy to give to anyone, for free. I don’t care to participate in popular culture. I don’t want fame or fortune, but I would take that platform if it was offered and the deal was good enough to radically change the lives of those closest to me. That would be the motivation (so hold me to it- supporters of the underground world of sound).

These were my thoughts as I drove across Ohio one day last week- delusional, dehydrated, and just done with a phone call from a friendly man on the west coast.