To Hinn Enkelte

Fresh off the road from Atlanta, Tyler Lyle showed up on my front porch one unusually cold Wilmington afternoon.  Evidently unprepared for the weather, he quickly accepted my offer for a cup of tea with a smile and a shiver.  I apologize for the unpleasant temperature: “Wilmington really only has two seasons,” I say, “Summer and February. I don’t know what this is.”

It’s easy to pass the time with Tyler, there’s contentment about his character that makes him quite affable, and his humble nature makes him all the more likable.  Evidenced by the fact that a good deal of the weekend was spent in conversation over a warm cup of coffee or a cool glass of wine, Tyler always welcoming ‘the-more-the-merrier’ to join in the communion.  It’s a lot like hanging out with your big brother’s best friend–but without noogies and the bad advice, of course.

Tyler Lyle sometimes makes enough money to pay rent by playing his music in small venues, bars, or friends’ houses, but really he plays music because he loves…everything about it: its capacity to empower and to disarm, to soften and to support, to facilitate the unlikely union.  And even more than music, he’s about knowing people, experiencing life, and having a good beer—I know, because I watched the way he savored his Guinness. He lives surrounded by artists in his east Atlanta community (his way of “mapping life,” he says),  reads 19^th century existentialist philosophy, and plans on going to grad school next year.  Attention all single ladies:  I have found you a thinker.

When I asked Tyler  “what is art?” (only then to apologize for posing the intangible, unanswerable question)  he responded with, “I’m not so much interested in that question, what I’m more interested in is what compels me, what comes from the heart, what comes from the place that puts me in a state of connection with something that’s beyond.”  This how Tyler lives, he’s about connection.

Here’s an example: He was given two hours to play at a local wine bar in town, but cut the set to one hour—the rest was spent in conversation with the people around him. “More than an individual artist, I see myself as part of a community that I’m in,” he says. This is likewise his sentiment towards his own community, one that consists of artists of all kinds—from musicians to sculptors–who gather every weekend to create, and eat, of course. “There’s no real way to mark this time–this motion that we’re going through–without other people there; they’re how you gauge what’s actually going on,” he says, “if you’re all alone, then nothing really matters.

And motion has been his theme of late.  He spent the bulk of 2008 abroad in Prague and in Paris teaching English, a journey that began him turning the pages his quest for self-discovery with great fervor, “[the move] was defining that difference between skepticism and ardor, which, I believe, is the question everyone must answer.”  But for lack of funds and visa, Tyler was forced to abbreviate his stay and moved back to his rural hometown of Carrollton, Georgia, only to pick up and leave three months later, currently calling east Atlanta’s Grant Park home. “My sister and I just bought a house [there], it’s completely wooden inside.  People keep asking me if I’m going to paint, but there’s no way.”  (I think Tyler likes feeling like a cowboy).

While Tyler has been physically mobile for the past year or two, he’s also been on the move spiritually, emotionally, and musically.  “Motion,” he says, is the message of his most recent musical endeavor, Notes From The Parade, released in 2009.  The EP’s pseudo title track, “A Parade,” opens with the line, “when we are old we won’t need to touch to make love,” speaking, he says, to the holiness of motion: “to be able to subtract all the component parts of a life, and at the end still have something else…that’s what philosophy was for the Greeks, it was a study of motion.”

“Pinewood Chests,” the album’s most sentimental-feeling track, also speaks to the sanctity of life.  After we box ourselves and our loved ones in these chests, we must then discover what we are to do with them.  “Time moves steady along,” goes the song, “it’s a similar tune for a different song,” charging, it seems for a carpe diem type of individual.  “I don’t really expect everyone to get that, but the album is devoted to the one individual who will,” says Tyler, dedicating Notes from the Parade “to Hinn Enkelte,” in the spirit of Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote for this individual whose soul would resonate with his work, albeit one out of many.

But not to worry, there’s always some humor with Tyler, so he’s not about to go totally Nietzsche on you; he can’t go more than a few minutes without cracking a joke, usually at his own expense, “But really, none of this is serious,” he assures me,  “I don’t take myself very seriously.”

As far as the rest of the album goes, think Bob Dylan on “A Secret,” and Sufjan Stevens on “Closer to Me,” though Tyler’s music suffers nothing from predictability—it certainly has a brand of its own, he knows how to flip influence for originality.

“I play music because I love,” he pauses, seemingly finished with the thought, “playing music,” he adds.  Tyler is the kind of artist we’ve been hunting for here at red thought—an artist not so married to the art as much as the experience and that which is garnered,  more for living than for acquiring.

Cheers, Tyler. Keep creating, and we will keep loving.