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When William Tyler put out Goes West in 2019, the album minted what the Nashville-born guitarist calls “an expansive, aspirational part of my life”. It was a prettier take on the crisp heartland Krautrock of his 2016 breakout Modern Country. Both were released on renowned US indie label Merge, his home after starting out as sideman for Silver Jews and Lambchop in the early 2000s. “I was living in California,” says Tyler, 45. “I was travelling the world. My career was very much upwards.” He embraced it, for better or worse. “From 2017 to 2019, the years I was living in LA, I will fully admit that I was riding a kind of ego-type energy that was probably good for a while, but certainly was apathy for real personal growth.”
Goes West was Tyler’s attempt to capitalise on Modern Country, seeing how commercial he could possibly make instrumental guitar music originally informed by Popol Vuh, Public Image Ltd and discordant label Siltbreeze. “But there’s a glass ceiling,” he says now, in his lovely southern accent, speaking from his parents’ house in Nashville. Declining record sales generally meant it only sold as much as Tyler’s second album, 2013’s Impossible Truth. Additionally, he says, “the way I was drinking was moving in a pretty negative direction. Being in your late 30s, your body and mind start not being as resilient to it.”
Tyler turned 40 in December 2019. When the Covid pandemic hit the US two months later, he moved in with his parents and “doubled down” on drinking. “I call it a great regression,” he says. “I felt very childlike in a way that wasn’t comforting; I guess some would say childish, which is true. There were complexes being triggered by substance use, but also the isolation and loneliness.” As a child, Tyler was treated for depression and OCD and diagnosed with Asperger’s. “I was a very isolated kid until I started playing music and joining bands in high school. I didn’t really have something that connected me with other kids my age. I was very insular in a way that wasn’t super confidence-inducing.”
Last September, Tyler put out a brief statement saying he was cancelling an imminent UK tour owing to “a mental health crisis and alcoholism”. You don’t have to know all this to hear his forthcoming album, Time Indefinite, and immediately realise that he has been grappling with immense distress. Even as their knowing titles expressed scepticism about US decline, Modern Country and Goes West were bold, frontier-ward records full of giddy, complex playing. The few clear guitar refrains on Time Indefinite chime with nursery-rhyme simplicity, but generally Tyler’s trademark instrument is smeared and stretched through static and distant choral samples in a blasted-out signal-to-noise ratio.
He has likened it to guitarist Fennesz meeting writer Eudora Welty; imagine, too, avant-garde composer William Basinski at the state fair. Haunting, beautiful and unsettlingly close, it’s hard not to hear as an obliteration of self. “I think you’re completely right,” says Tyler. “It is a reconfiguration of my identity because that’s what I’ve been feeling.”
Despite the heavy subjects, Tyler is endlessly warm and open, an ardent history buff fond of sweeping thoughts that relate the personal to the political. His friend and collaborator, Portland guitarist and friend Marisa Anderson, calls him “a symphonic thinker” and says his new music is “very William: vulnerable in a way you wouldn’t necessarily recognise right away”. You only had to see the support under his tour cancellation post – from Margo Price, Yasmin Williams and Six Organs of Admittance – to see how beloved he is within the Americana community. And outside it: later this year brings an album with British producer Four Tet (AKA Kieran Hebden), teased by the 2023 single Darkness, Darkness. “He can take an influence like country music, which is quite distant from what I do, but he has a way of combining that with drone music, minimalism, electronic,” says Hebden. “All these things connected with me.”
Yet Tyler says he had always felt like an untrained impostor. His parents are Nashville songwriters but he found his way to music through DIY culture. He seems to feel sheepish that in 2020, he didn’t “sit around playing guitar”, although he and Anderson made the rich, grave album Lost Futures. Otherwise, that first year at his parents’ house, Tyler only had a handheld recording device and his phone, which he used to record guitar parts while immersing himself in fading formats: cassettes, VHS and staticky late-night radio. “I loved the weird disconnectedness of all this,” he says. “It’s actually very comforting.”
He preserved his lo-fi recordings as the mood of the album: transparently a harder listen than anything he’s made before, although its sense of decay feels proof of life in our increasingly AI-neutered culture. “I was trying to liberate myself from my expectations about where I was supposed to be going in a career,” says Tyler. “The arts are very aspirational, you have to have a lot of ambition, confidence, momentum, and that disappeared for me for a while. I was tired of this identity and it doesn’t reflect where I’m at, emotionally and creatively.”
Time Indefinite borrows its title from a film by Ross McElwee, one of Tyler’s favourite documentarians and a fellow southerner. “That film is very personal but very meandering – it’s about him having a child but watching his father die, all these mixed-emotion, heavy life events happening on top of each other,” he says.” That’s Tyler’s experience of the past four years: pain and joy; growth and loss: “I wanted to convey that emotional reality is not linear.”
For Tyler, that stumbling path was “primarily based around alcohol”. Touring since age 20 didn’t help, though he is quick to point out that alcohol misuse is endemic to the normalised pressure we all live with. “I can’t really pinpoint the exact moment where it crossed a line, but it’s been hard for me to tour and not feel hemmed in by it.” Plus, he adds, “like a lot of people – I’m not trying to make an excuse – the 2020s have been very spiritually disorienting for me”, a combination of the pandemic and political upheaval leaving him feeling “very untethered”.
Tyler went to rehab last summer, which he calls “a positive experience. It’s hard. It’s not One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” he laughs, “but it’s also not The White Lotus.” He took a class on grief and accepted that its different stages often happen simultaneously. Grieving his old Silver Jews bandmate David Berman, who killed himself in 2019, left him with “complicated feelings about how his legacy was almost instantly shifted into this mythical ‘tragic artist’ zone”; there was also grief for Tyler’s former identity, and “macro-tragic” global shifts.
When Tyler was frustrated by his midlife challenges, he used to ask loved ones: “‘Why can’t I just wake up and be the person I was five years ago?’” he recalls. “I was operating in a way that was a little too eager, getting ahead of myself.” Despite his progress last year, when the UK tour was soon to start, he knew he wasn’t ready. “Right after I cancelled, my sister told me, ‘You have to confront why you have this sense of urgency about wanting to resolve things, running out of time. You’re setting yourself up for perpetual anxiety.’ And that really hit me.” Making a public statement about his issues was “to hold me to a better level of accountability. And I have to say it has. It’s why I feel good about moving forward this year.”
Tyler says he has found forgiveness and empathy within group therapy, qualities apparently in short supply in Trump’s dark new America. Had he not become a musician, Tyler would have pursued history: he is obsessed with crumbling empires and perceives the US as one of them. He is voluble and precise about this being “the strangest time that I can remember being an American” as scary as it is ridiculous; about “chronic digital loneliness”, individualism, isolation, Republicans jettisoning social responsibility, the right’s weaponisation of counterculture: “It’s not an empathetic model.” (He would make a great professor, and sends links to relevant books after the interview.)
Tyler is noticeably prone to self-interrogation, conscious of being a middle-aged, white, southern man. He’s always been intellectually curious, he says, and never comfortable with traditional masculinity. While Trump symbolises one such crisis, “I think a lot of men my age feel very lost in whatever this paradigm is that’s changed,” says Tyler. He doesn’t trust anyone who doesn’t question their beliefs, and calls that instinct within himself a sign of optimism. “I’ve never been dogmatic about anything, and that’s anxiety-inducing at times. But while the world is certainly hierarchical, it’s not linear. People’s narratives need to change if you’re going to grow as a human being or a soul. And that can be painful.”
Tyler came to realise that “grief outlives its usefulness as a primary emotion very quickly, at least when it comes to things one has no control over,” he says. “It’s painful to imagine a new future when your sense of self has been so shaken, or you’ve had tragic loss, but reclaiming that agency is crucial to a holistic self-actualisation.” He considers himself to be starting again: “There’s a degree of having to relearn how to do this.” He left Merge for the smaller, artist-run label Psychic Hotline and will tour more gently. “I don’t want to retreat any more,” he says. “I would like to re-enter this world that used to bring me a lot of joy, but I have to do it cautiously.”
He calls the Four Tet collaboration a “hail Mary” that came out of asking Hebden to produce an album for him. “I think what intrigued him about working with me was actually some of the things that I might feel more self-conscious about, like my background in country music,” says Tyler. It turned out Hebden’s father loves the 80s country of Tyler’s youth; they’ve covered a Lyle Lovett song. Tyler likens Hebden to Fugazi and the Grateful Dead as “one of the more punk-rock people I’ve ever met in music. That’s a really inspiring model of how to live as an artist, especially when you’ve been doing it for 20 years.” The album is “not what people expect it to sound like, in a good way” – another fresh start.
Tyler admits now that he “always fully accepted that none of us get to go back to being who we were – that is a childish sentiment. I don’t really know what’s in front of me. I hope there’s some good stuff, but it is probably going to look completely different from what I imagined.” He mentions Jung’s concept of the midlife crisis, “the transformational opportunity people have at that point where they can either implode, double down on the myth or be open to letting a new myth be born.” The latter, he says, “is where I’m at”.
