The Tyler Grant CD

I have a hot new CD for sale.

Its title is “Tyler Grant – In the Light,” and it is a 13-cut mix of bluegrass and country-rock, and the title song – “In the Light” – is a stopper.

Tyler is my son, just turned 30, and now in his fourth year in Nashville, picking and writing songs and learning the business. This is his first CD. He is the lead singer, the guitarist, the producer, and the stock-room boy.

You can read more about Tyler and his band at www.myspace.com/tylerhgrant, including his list of his major musical influences. It is a long list, beginning with Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, Jerry Garcia, David Grier, and then fourth on the list (ahead of Tony Rice!) is “Michael Grant.” Tickles me to death. I do play guitar: three chords and a suggestion of Elvis. Tyler likes something about the way I play, but I think my influence was more as an archivist than as an artist. When Tyler and his older sister Jessie were babies, I would play my old Presley, Cash, Perkins and Berry 45s on the stereo and bounce them in my arms in those pure energy music waves streaming from the speakers.

He also is just now getting a Website up, at www.tylergrant.org.

Then, as now, I have always been on the alert for songs that stop me. When I hear them for the first time, they hit me so hard that I play them over and over again. It can be as simple a thing as a chord change, or as complex a thing as “Stardust,” which I believe is the biggest stopper of all time. I love it when I hear a stopper for the first time. It doesn’t happen very often, and it happened this week. Tyler sent us a copy of the master CD and it was there in the mailbox as I was out the door to work. I was listening to it driving to work when “In the Light” hit me.

I played it again, and again and again. Yes, I know, Tyler is my son, but there is no bias here. A song either stops you or it doesn’t. Tyler has been writing and playing music for a long time, and he never wrote a bad song (if you ask me). He never played one that knocked me over, either, until “In the Light.” I have always been loyal, but now I am hooked. Tyler Grant goes on a short list of artists who have flat run me over with a song.

So I shill without shame. The CD will be available online from FGM Records around June 1; when I know the date, I will post it. You can advance order by going to www.tylergrant.org and click on the CD logo in the left margin. The order page has a complete rundown of the 13 tracks, with comments. FGM Records is the distribution side of Flatpicking Guitar Magazine. “Flatpicking,” of course, is the 100-mile-an-hour guitar style made popular by Doc Watson, Tony Rice, Ricky Skaggs and others. Tyler has become well-known enough among the flatpickers, both as artist and teacher, to be scheduled to be on the magazine’s July cover.

This is the independent, or “indie,” route to getting one’s music into the mainstream, and it has arisen in response to today’s high-octane distillation of the old artistic catch-22: if you don’t have a track record, you must not have commercial appeal. Most media arts companies today are run by corporations who will not take the slightest business risk. They want the money in their hands before they sign the contract, and that shuts out most new artists and their sounds, and makes the stoppers even more few and far between.

Tyler seemed to understand from the first, what it would take. He started learning guitar when he was in high school, but he didn’t stop there. He completed the music program at Grossmont College and then took his degree in Music Performance from California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Along the way, he learned not only guitar, but music. His CalArts recitals included pieces from bluegrass to Bach (you will find Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Bartok, also, in his list of musical influences, but far down the list from “Michael Grant”).

He also learned the academics of the business of music. When he moved to Nashville, he started to learn the realities of the business of music. He practiced constantly, played constantly, taught lessons, wrote songs, toured with a band (Adrienne Young and Little Sadie), entered and won a couple of flat-picking contests, went to many festivals and conferences, played bluegrass in China, jammed countless nights and early mornings with some really famous players, and listened as these people taught him how the business works. He also found a day job, substitute teaching in the Nashville school system.

When he was professionally ready, he borrowed money, assembled a band (fiddle, banjo, mandolin, dobro, bass, drums), reserved studio time, put sleep on hold, rehearsed the cuts until they were tight, developed the CD cover, recorded and mixed the songs, and on Monday Karen and I found the CD in our mailbox. She will tell you, too, it’s a quality product, from a quality artist.