19 December 29, 2022–January 4, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER | CONTENTS | UNFAIR PARK | SCHUTZE | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | MOVIES | DISH | MUSIC | CLASSIFIED | gave me these Altoids,” Duddy recalls. “We didn’t really get to hang out, but later I was helping produce a record for Josh Desure and I invited him over to play some key- boards. Jonny’s really great at creating an overall vibe for an album that doesn’t feel like you’re listening to the same song over and over again, creating these textures that run throughout everything. Super under- rated guitar player too. He’s like Jeff Tweedy: unconventional and clever, a true student of theory — he’s hot and he’s smart.” After a long break, during which Tyler fo- cused mainly on gigging and producing, Un- derground Forever entered the world in 2019, and was more or less completed throughout the duration of the pandemic. Only one song and other minor alterations were made to the album prior to its release in November 2022, nearly three years after sitting on the shelf. The album that was eventually released — containing the same songs — features a different track sequence from the finished product that Tyler originally had planned in 2020. His rationale for the change in se- quencing? “I shuffled the songs on my phone and liked the new order,” he says. Though, by that point, more than half of the album’s songs had been released as sin- gles, starting with the title track in April 2020 at the height of COVID panic. Obvi- ously, Tyler didn’t know there was going to be a pandemic when he wrote “Under- ground Forever,” but throughout the first month of the lockdowns in late March and early April 2020, he realized that some of the songs he had written resonated themati- cally with what was happening in the world. “I’ve heard songwriters forever talk about how a song is kind of in the universal subconscious or that ocean of subconscious that the world has,” he says. “It’s going to hit somebody; somebody is going to write the song, it’s just whoever has the antenna out and catches the frequency first. The song is going to get out through someone, and it just so happened that I caught these songs. The whole thing felt like a premonition, because what I wrote ended up being pertinent to what was happening.” The first verse and chorus of “Under- ground Forever” epitomize this, despite having been written a year before the world became trapped indoors: “Can we hide out in the hills? Or sleep in ‘till noon? I feel I’m gonna break if I don’t get out pretty soon. It’s all right, feeling uptight, there’s enough light, we’ll get through the night together. Windows down, leaving this town, never get found, going underground forever.” Tyler took advantage of the isolation and shot the cryptic video for “Underground Forever” in the nearly deserted streets of Austin to great effect. The video (directed by Justin Spence, Nikki Lane and Tyler him- self) portrays Tyler tossing and turning at night to a seemingly endless array of televi- sion screens filled with pundits and com- mercials that ultimately feel like noise. In the video, Tyler wakes up in the empty, almost post-apocalyptic vision of Austin wearing a tattered jumpsuit of the American flag. While searching the empty streets on his bicycle, he encounters a mysterious, sharply dressed secret agent (played by col- laborator and fellow singer-songwriter Josh Desure), who provides him with a gold shovel. Shovel in hand, Tyler rides out to the wooded outskirts of Austin and begins to dig underground. Having dug a hole deeper than himself, he discovers a chest buried in the soil. He opens the chest, but its contents are never revealed to the viewer. Tyler sim- ply takes his golden shovel and rides away, leaving the mysterious chest behind. As the song’s final chord melts from major to mi- nor, the video fades from color to black-and- white. It’s a musical question mark. Tyler has described his latest album roll- out many times as an “experiment” to learn whether an album can reach an audience completely organically, without a label push of any sort. He’s repeatedly expressed disil- lusionment with the mechanics of the con- temporary click-driven, TikTok-focused industry. While media burnout is a recurring theme in his most recent songs, Tyler never seems to take up an old-man-yells-at-cloud attitude. His stance is a wise yet cautionary one: He’s been there, done that, and the marketing machine is clearly not for him. “The dream or idea is that if you make something that’s really great, it’s just going to get out there and people are going to hear it,” Tyler told Cardenas. “There are times where I believe it, and there’s other times where I’m like ‘there’s no way.’” It’s in Jonathan Tyler’s home studio, which he refers to as “Clyde’s VIP Room,” where most of the magic happens. A small rear bedroom converted into a studio, the room is crammed with a bevy of equipment and memorabilia. A poster of Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen adorns one wall, while behind a drum set and a thicket of stu- dio cables hangs a Telecaster autographed by Billy Gibbons, as does the American flag suit from the “Underground Forever” video. The room feels like a singular illustration of Tyler’s creativity, ground zero for his sonic and philosophical explorations — big- ger on the inside than on the outside. Out in the yard is a garden area, and conspicuously lying on the ground is the golden shovel. The background of Tyler’s computer is a still of the famous parade scene from the end of Federico Fellini’s struggling-artist masterpiece 8½, a movie Tyler calls his fa- vorite. He queues up a demo track that he and his songwriter friend Jimmy recorded that same day; it’s called “Models,” and it’s about supermodels. “Have you ever heard a song about mod- els?” he asks with a laugh. “Me neither.” Most of Underground Forever was re- corded in California with producer Rob Schnapf, but one song on the album added late in the game was recorded off the cuff in Clyde’s VIP Room and became a sleeper hit of sorts: “Old Friend.” The simple, mostly acoustic ditty is a sonic outlier on Underground Forever, yet it func- tions as the album’s emotional centerpiece. While the rest of the album is in motion, con- cerned with uncertainty, “Old Friend” is somehow nostalgic for the present, in a world constantly worried about the future. “Someday these days will be worth re- membering,” Tyler sings on the chorus. Given that the song was released during the beginning of the end of the dog days of the pandemic, it’s a welcome balm. At the moment, Underground Forever is available only digitally, and unlike Holy Smokes, Tyler has yet to commit to a physi- cal release. But for him that’s not an issue. Months after its release, “Old Friend” was getting 4,600 plays per day, without any kind of help from a label. “There’s no marketing,” he says trium- phantly of “Old Friend,” his experiment ulti- mately a success. “It’s all holistic. All grassroots. Just because people care. You can spend all the money on the sonic tinkering, but it’s all about the song,” he says, still beam- ing. “Although, I love the sonic tinkering.” Despite having such a distinctive, dreamy sound in his own production — one that was put to good use on Holy Smokes — for Under- ground Forever Tyler opted to hand over production duties to Schnapf, whose CV in- cludes Elliott Smith’s Figure 8, Toadies’ Rub- berneck, Beck’s Mellow Gold and others. “I love his albums,” Tyler says. “Sonically, I think he’s one of the best in the business. When you listen to songs like ‘Movin’ On’ and ‘Hustlin,’’ you can hear all the layers. Rob is unreal, he’s just a badass.” To prove his point, Tyler puts on a woozy ballad recorded by The Vines and produced by Schnapf called “Autumn Shade II.” At the conclusion of the song, Tyler stands up and puts on his jacket as he prepares to lead the party a few blocks down the street to a wa- tering hole called Sam’s Town Point. Walking around Sam’s Town Point on any given night are a variety of musical individu- als. Ramsay Midwood is playing tonight, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott might swing by tomor- row, and on this particular weekend, walking around is a singer-songwriter by the name of Sarah Lee Guthrie, a third-generation folk singer following in the footsteps of her father and grandfather — later revealed to be none other than Arlo and Woody Guthrie. Alone at the end of the bar is Tyler, Altoids in pocket, with a rock-solid, enchanting grin, his face crookedly exhibiting amusement. He’s staring straight ahead, not even touching his drink. Above the entrance to the bar, a black-and-white sign reads, “Someday these days will be worth remembering.” “Life’s like a frequency wave, you know?” he says. “They go up really high and they go down low. So everybody who acts like one way or the other, they have that other side. The downside is if you don’t have a particu- larly high peak of one, you don’t have partic- ularly low value of the other. But it’s boring.” Tyler stops to reassess whether he found the right word to make his point. “Well, maybe not boring,” he says. “But the passion of life comes from the risk and the reward.” Tyler’s musical journey can be compared to the physical and emotional journey un- dertaken by Harry Dean Stanton’s reserved protagonist Travis in the iconic Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas, another work that juxtaposes the ephemeral with the real. It’s the sky versus the road, it’s wandering the wide-open spaces of West Texas on a voyage of discovery. Tyler stands up and looks out the win- dow into the noisy night, toward the direc- tion of where the golden shovel might be. “So, what have I discovered?” puffnstuffsmokeshop.com Current Store HourS: MON-THUR 10aM - 10pM •FRI & SaT 10aM - 11pM • SUN 12pM - 10pM The Best Selection & Prices of Smoking Accessories and more in DFW! We Carry CBD!
