Tyler Lyle |

I’ve already waxed on about just how much this Lyle fellow manages to blow me away. Get ready, I’m gonna do it again…

Today, a woman died. She was a woman without any family to speak of, her mother having died years ago, leaving her father and her to frantically and very seriously mourn her loss for years upon years. Her father, a man named Jack, possessed the ability to put his finger on a stack of one dollar bills and tell me exactly how many there were. He was 80 and his mind was a dagger. Late last year he died.

His daughter, this woman, had spent every second of her 60 years caring for her parents. She was never allowed to ride a school bus for her mother feared it would crash and she’d be left without a child. She was not allowed to play with cousins at the reunions and the making of friends was discouraged but really, she didn’t mind. She had her mother and father.

She lost Jack last year and while the rest of us mourned and carried on, she holed up in the house. She went to the post office occasionally and bought tv dinners and bologna at the grocery store once every couple weeks. She avoided people, even those of us that loved her so.

No one thought to check in on her when she didn’t empty her post office box for a month, her very much needed social security check languishing uncashed there in that dark metal hole. I didn’t think to stop and check on her when I noticed her front door ajar all weekend. I simply thought she was doing better, not missing Jack so much anymore, and that she wanted to see the sunlight out there. To watch the cars go by maybe, to be reminded there are people out there still alive. All the while, she was alone and done gone for the better of a month. No one even noticed.

I was listening to Tyler Lyle when Jack died. And today I’m listening to him again, unexpectedly, just as I’ve learned that the one connection to him has gone too, a death that will go unnoticed even in a town of gossips and prideful know-it-alls. I hadn’t planned to say anything to the internet about Jack and his kin and I certainly didn’t plan to write about death. But being directed to Notes From The Parade, which Lyle has put forth as a thank you to his fans, a portion of the population of which I’m a part, today and then finding this song seemed so goddamn serendipitous. I just couldn’t help myself.

Somehow, I feel better now. Like maybe it’s okay that we didn’t do what we thought we should do for the woman that died in her house, all alone, because there was nothing to be done anyway. That in the end, time does indeed move steady along. A similar tune for a different song.

Tyler Lyle :: Pinewood Chests [mp3]

Notes From The Parade :: BANDCAMP

PS – Read the ‘liner notes’. It’s worth 5 minutes of your valuable time.

PPS – Give this dude some of your money, seriously. I swear, if I find out you went over there and just took this shit and didn’t throw down at least like, your last 22 cents, then I’ma find you and fight you. With fists.

I’m not the first to write of this album. I’m not the second or third, even. But then, I’m also not one of the first few to tell you about the deliciousness of fucking ice cream and my doing so would most likely cause you to crave a cone so what does it matter, really?

Yesterday morning an album fell into my lap, an album laced with summer sounds and winter emotions, mixing those two things into a concoction that a pharmacist of yore would have blended with his mortar and pestle as a remedy for the malaise that affects me when the realization of summer’s end hits me. I listened intently as ‘The Golden Age & the Silver Girl’ played through once and I let it ruminate. I listened again and as the coming of the second track approached I was hopeful that the romp with this goodness could continue and that, as is usually the case, I had not been hit with a beautiful track only to be let down by an album.

Seven or so years ago, there was a record player. That player sat atop a rickety dresser in a bedroom purposely darkened with black woolen blankets on the windows. I was not working; I should have been. I was not stable; I could have been had I been willing to leave that room, I think now. Under the needle of that record player was a live Paul Simon album. On that album was a song called ‘Duncan’. Within that song was a winded instrument, blowing so lovely in the background and magnifying the sadness, all the while adding a shred of hope through music notes on a page. I stood next to that dresser for months (and that’s no exaggeration), hands perched over the needle, waiting for the moment that I would have to move it and steady it for a replay. Back then, it was that buoyant and undeniably enthusiastic sound in the background of that song that kept me alive.

Yesterday morning, there was that sound again but this time, the words were beckoning me to smile and show my teeth, despite the fact that I think the sentiment behind the song might be something about what I was going through back then, at a time when only the story of Lincoln Duncan felt good. And so perfectly, that propensity to remember and yet move on remains on every track set forth on The Golden Age…

All these years later someone has taken that dark room and that scratchy vinyl and they’ve put a beautiful, hopeful spin on it. All those years are gone and we lived through it. Summer is leaving now too, but she will return, that girl.

The title track, as all others have told, is so worth your time but I encourage you to not stick there — peruse ALL those tracks for they are all worth just as much as the first. There are banjos and words of love, there are guitars of the twangy slide type, and there are floating horns, all for the good of your soul. There is an explanation of the album and it’s origins that will melt your heart, if you have a heart at all…

For fuck’s sake, just give this man your six dollars.

Tyler Lyle :: The Golden Age & the Silver Girl [stream]