TYLER LYLE SHARES HOPEFUL SINGLE “NAGANO”

Atlanta’s own Tyler Lyle, songwriter, vocalist, producer and multi-instrumentalist best known for his work with synthwave standard bearers The Midnight, shares the hopeful new single “Nagano” from his forthcoming album The Transcendentalist. Due October 23, the album marks his first new solo release in seven years. The track follows “Pondicherry” and “Death’s Commuter Blues.”

“Nagano” emerged from a period of profound change for Lyle and his family, following his wife Anna’s battle with blood cancer and recovery. While in Australia on tour with The Midnight, Lyle found himself confronting what it meant to move forward after a difficult year.

Lyle shares:

“In Tasmania (like in the rest of Australia, and in Britain, Hong Kong and New Zealand, I’d later learn) the sign Americans call a yield sign carries two words on the familiar red-and-white triangle: Give Way.

I’d just finished a tour of Australia with my band, The Midnight. The year before, my wife had been diagnosed with a blood cancer, and we’d spent hard months pushing through her chemo and recovery. Now that she was well, we’d made a point of traveling. I had five days alone in Tasmania before she and our son flew in to meet me and we set off around the world. Call it a victory lap for surviving.

I took long walks by the sea in Hobart, watching the bees work the wildflowers on the fences by the Mariner’s Cottages and the sunset shadows on Mount Wellington. Somewhere in those five days it became clear that the old me, the smaller me, was going to have to die for me to grow past the pain and the limits that were starting to suffocate me.

Healing is a miracle, but it didn’t arrive as a voice from the heavens. Mine came as a traffic instruction. I looked up at the sign in front of me: Give Way. I broke down. Only when I gave up feeling the need to force my life, did I get back the experience of feeling alive. I gave way.”

That journey through uncertainty, surrender and healing runs throughout the new album. Written during a period that encompassed Anna’s illness and recovery, becoming a father and Lyle’s own reckoning with growing older, The Transcendentalist finds him newly attuned to life’s fragility and the importance of being present.

“That feeling was accompanied by these lucid moments of presence that I’ve never had before,” Lyle says. “You’re driving home from the doctor’s and just seeing how vivid and stark the colors are in your neighborhood for the first time. It’s kind of shocking to be in so much internal pain and also so close to – I don’t know – the true nature of the world or something like that.”

Across 10 tracks, The Transcendentalist marks a return to the confessional singer-songwriter roots that preceded The Midnight. Whittled down from 40 self-recorded songs, the album was produced by Lyle and features Grouplove’s Ben Homola on drums, Daniel Gleason on bass, Rhett Shull of The Midnight on guitar and T.J. Elias engineering.

“It’s all a singular journey toward a healing that I didn’t think I was headed towards,” says Lyle.

Follow Tyler Lyle:

Share this:

Related