Time Indefinite William Tyler

After crucial stints in Silver Jews and Lambchop, William Tyler emerged with a string of inquisitive albums that paired his country rearing and classical enthusiasm with his ardor for experimentation and field recordings. His productive enclave of instrumental music has not only ushered in new sounds, but also critical new voices. No other solo American guitarist this century has impacted that fecund scene quite like him. And on the brilliant, bracing Time Indefinite, Tyler’s first solo album in five years, he steps at last into the widening gyre he helped create. The guitar is the starting point for an album that will make you reconsider not only Tyler but also the possibilities of an entire field. A vortex of noise and harmony, ghosts and dreams, anguish and hope, it is not just a great guitar record. It is a stunning record by a great guitarist, a masterpiece of our collectively anxious time.

In early 2020, as the world teetered at the edge of unrests still unimagined, Tyler left LA for Nashville, where he’d lived most of his life. Most of his gear and all of his records stayed, awaiting a presumed rapid return. It, of course, wasn’t. So as Tyler dealt with the depression, nerves, and questions of those endlessly tense times, he began recording ideas with his phone and a cassette deck, resigning himself to the distortion inherent in those devices. Tyler was talking with Kieran Hebden about making a record together, and some of these bits felt like test cases. As that collaboration crept in other directions Tyler magpied other sounds. He asked longtime friend, producer Jake Davis, to help stitch them together, opting to embrace the hiss and wobble and to unintentionally make a record that reflected those times and these—uneasy, damaged, honest.

A seesaw of struggle and survival defines these songs, a map of anguish and belief and the trails that link them. “This is a mental illness record,” Tyler will tell you without shame, as open in life and speech as he is on tape. “It’s music about losing your mind but not wanting to, about trying to come back.” He doesn’t need to tell you that; you can feel it, possibly recognize it from your own experience.

Tyler’s albums have been nests of non-musical influences, as he has pivoted between spirituality and philosophy and summoned the landscapes of the greater American imagination. Time Indefinite is no different, especially in the way it conjures the deeply personal films of Ross McElwee. In the mid-’80s, he began to make a movie about Sherman’s march through the South, but it spiraled into a tangled history about family, loss, and what we do when our best instincts surrender to the worst things we can imagine. The record is a nod to this idea, of time’s relentless push and our place in, beneath, and beside it. It is no great revelation that the lives we lead shape the work we make, whether or not we intend that to be the case. In these songs, you can hear Tyler wrestle with incoming demons out loud—addiction, middle age, loneliness, neurosis. All of our struggles are different, but we are united in having them. This is the soundtrack that Tyler’s create.