Summer is winding down, but that doesn’t mean this year’s music festival season is stopping any time soon. For the next few weeks, there are a ton of music extravaganzas taking place all over the globe. This weekend in Connecticut, for fans of folk, blues, country and bluegrass, it’s the Black Bear Americana Music Fest. The seventh edition will be at the Harwinton Fairgrounds from August 22 – 24 and will include the likes of Shawn Mullins, Howie Day and Jeffrey Gaines among others, with camping, and refreshments for purchase in a family-friendly atmosphere.
Another singer-songwriter taking part is Tyler Nail, who started his career in Winston-Salem but is currently based in Providence.
We had a chance to talk about his latest album, what initially made him want to move to New England, and being excited to be playing an event like this upcoming one, ahead of his performance as part of Black Bear’s first day on the acoustic stage at 2:20 p.m.
RD: Back in February, you released a new record called “Family”. Via the liner notes, it says that the record is a personal and heartfelt collection of songs inspired by the ties that bind us to the past, the people we come from, and the stories that shape who we are. It sounds like it’s a very personal album, so what inspired you to make a record like this?
TN: All of my albums are personal, obviously, but this one is a little different I guess because of where it taps into. While so many albums often focus on stories of yourself and your own life, this one taps into the lives of people I come from and who’ve raised me and stuff. I do suppose that this has created a perception of a different essence of a different depth of being personal, and I guess there’s probably some reason for that. The biggest reason I put this out is because some of the songs I had been sitting on for many years, and I kind of in my own mind had them in the category of being family songs due to them being songs about family members. I have other songs where they’re this style of communication or they’re this style of poetry or whatever, so I had a category kind of in my mind that these are family songs.
When I moved to Rhode Island and away from home for the first time, it made me identify that I was also separated from family for the first time. When I sat down to try and figure out how I wanted to go about releasing an album, maybe in a different way than I have in the past, that was one of the things that stood out. I thought there was something kind of poetic to the idea of paying homage to my family as my first step out into life on my own. That was the theme I landed on and jumped into.
RD: I know you recorded the album in three different locations at True Music Studios in Providence, Electro Magnetic Radiation Recordings in Winston-Salem and your home studio, which is currently based in Providence. When it came to these three different places, did you record in Winston-Salem first and then you finished things up in Providence? How did it all come about in this way?
TN: Yeah, I started it all in North Carolina, but not literally all of it, I guess. It’s more of me starting a recording project in North Carolina that I thought was going to be my next release. I had this idea in my mind that I was going to go into the studio and just record things by myself with nothing but me and a guitar. I did that all in North Carolina and I recorded a lot of the foundational tracks for the songs, but some of them I didn’t, some of them are newer than that. I sat on those recordings for a long time, I kept wanting to do more with them and more instrumentation and stuff.
I’m a multi-instrumentalist, so I wanted to have some more time in the studio, but when I got to Rhode Island it was much harder. In North Carolina, I had a whole big space to myself, and in Rhode Island, my home studio is very limited. I don’t have a big space and I don’t even have all my instruments with me anymore. When I moved up to the area, I just ended up meeting a guy who had a studio at True Music Studios and we started doing work together and stuff. That’s where I found the room to go back into the studio with some of these foundational tracks along with some newer songs to just keep working on them.
Then I started exploring more things, we re-tracked some of the songs, and then I would take them home. I guess what I kind of did was use the nicer studio spaces at True Music and Electro Magnetic to lay the foundational tracks with just my voice and my guitar, then I would take them home and do mandolin on them, do a second guitar or something that doesn’t have quite an impact on the overall mix. That’s kind of the balance that I struck, and I outsourced a couple of the recordings with people as well, so that was the relationship between all of them. I used the two studios for primary tracking and I used my home studio for secondary tracking.
RD: Very cool. You just mentioned that you’re a multi-instrumentalist, so what inspired you to use a guitar as your primary instrument these days for your solo music career, and what other instruments do you know how to play? Do you always intertwine them into your recordings?
TN: Yeah, usually. My first instrument was drums, that was how I started playing music and I have a very rhythm-centered perspective when it comes to music. I’m also melody-focused, but I’m very rhythmic with every instrument that I play. In my mind, I like to think that I play guitar, banjo and mandolin much like they are percussion instruments. When I was in my teens, guitar became my main source of expression and it’s a little more wide in its capability where it can include melody with rhythm into the composition compared to drums.
It’s the instrument that I’m best at now and I have a fluency with guitar that allows me to write where I don’t really write when I’m on banjo or mandolin. Those I play around with as instruments, but with guitar, I feel very fluent so it allows me to just focus on writing, so that’s that. When I can, I always try to work the other instruments into things, but it’s always a balance. On “Family”, there’s some slide guitar too and sometimes when I start messing around with a whole bunch of instruments, I have to fight a temptation to try to include everything I know how to play. You don’t want to have slide, mandolin, banjo, piano, drums and bass on every song that you record, so you have to pick and choose which instruments are going to make the most sense with which song.
RD: That makes total sense. What initially inspired the move to where you’re from in North Carolina to where you currently are in Providence? When it comes to acclimating yourself into the scene in New England, how has it been up here versus where you’re from in Winston-Salem?
TN: Somebody who is very important to me lives in Providence, and she was the person who kind of put it on the map in my mind to think of it as a possibility for myself. I’ve lived in North Carolina my whole life and I had always thought that at some point I’d move away to see more of the world and what the country had to offer. I realized that I hadn’t reached that point yet and I hadn’t moved away, and it had started feeling very present to where I thought that I really had to do this. Like I said, this person in Providence kind of made me wonder if it would be a good place to start and from everything I’ve heard from the people I knew there, it sounded like it might be. It’s more affordable than some places in New England and it’s an interesting city, so I figured I’d do a visit and I liked the vibe so I thought that I would at least give it a try.
I think a lot of people get their first experience of their life as an independent adult or whatever in a different way. A lot of them get their first taste of that when they’re in college, then they go back home and they start their life again or whatever. I never went out to college, I just got out on my own during my early 20s while living in North Carolina for about 10 or 15 years, so this was kind of a big leap for me into a real feeling of this is all on me. It’s all on me to go network and meet people, rebuild my life, get a job and figure this all out. Providence has been a decent place for that, there’s a good community of folks.
There’s plenty of artists, there’s all sorts of different scenes. In the town I came from, there’s a little bit of a smaller arts scene in a way and a smaller world that the artists inhabit. I overlapped with a lot of them, but in Providence, I’ve noticed that they branch out into more places. There’s these different groups of artists in these different places and they all know each other. There’s punk scenes, there’s rock scenes and there are songwriter scenes, so there’s all of these different places to be an artist whereas that’s not exactly how it is where I came from.
It’s been cool to meet people, the culture is different and the community is totally different. The lifestyle is totally different, but that’s kind of exactly what I was looking for and I imagine that if I find myself somewhere else then I’ll experience a lot of it all over again. It’s pretty much been what I was looking for as a starting point for this chapter in my life.
RD: I’m glad that it’s worked out for you in that way. What are your thoughts on being part of the Black Bear Americana Music Fest? When it comes to a setting where it’s an all-outdoor environment and it’s pretty much an open canvas, what comes to mind?
TN: I love festivals. There’s something about them that has music being received so differently, I don’t know how to explain why that is. People are going to this thing and it appeals to them with it being outdoors and experiencing music for three days in a row. They’re immersed and excited to check out all these bands, so it’s just thrilling right off the bat to be able to be part of one of these things and step into an environment like that. This one is cool because it’s Americana-focused and I consider myself through and through to be an Americana artist.
When I meet people in New England, some of them aren’t really familiar with that term, but to have found this festival that’s really focused on Americana here in the area, I feel like it’s a really cool thing. Not only am I getting to tap into an audience in a different state, it’s an audience that seems to really care about the type of music that I make, so that’s just fun and exciting for me. I’m supposed to have my buddy Jonathan Loos with me, who’s another great songwriter who is currently living in New York City. We’re both going to be playing together on my set and it’s a challenge in a way. I’ve played festivals like this before and I’ve played plenty of shows, so it’s not like I don’t know what I’m getting into, but it’s always fun to take my set to a brand new audience and see how they’re going to respond to it.