Whitehouse Road - Tyler Childers
Photo credit: David McClister
We head Kentucky to meet our next LCM featured artist the excellent singer-songwriter Tyler Childers. A big thank you to Hannah Aldridge for the recommendation. Our LCM #SongOfTheDay is a great live version of 'Whitehouse Road' recorded at a OldVinyl Session last year. It was filmed in Oceanway Studios on Music Row in Nashville. The song is taken from Tyler's debut album 'Purgatory' released in January.
If you would like to see Tyler live in #London he is playing at Dingwalls on the 4th September
Like many great Southern storytellers, singer-songwriter Tyler Childers has fallen in love with a place. The people, landmarks and legendary moments from his childhood home of Lawrence County, Kentucky, populate the 10 songs in his formidable debut, 'Purgatory', an album that’s simultaneously modern and as ancient as the Appalachian Mountains in which events unfold.
The album, co-produced by Grammy Award winners Sturgill Simpson and David Ferguson, is a semiautobiographical sketch of Childers’ growth from wayward youth to happily married man, told in the tradition of a Southern gothic novel with a classic noir antihero who may just be irredeemable. 'Purgatory' is a chiaroscuro painting with darkness framing light in high relief. There’s catharsis and redemption. Sin and temptation. Murder and deceit. Demons and angels. Moonshine and cocaine. So much moonshine and cocaine. All played out on the large, colorful canvas of Eastern Kentucky.
Tyler had been searching for a certain sound for his debut album for years as he honed his craft, and was finding it elusive when his friend, drummer Miles Miller, introduced him to Sturgill Simpson, the Grammy Award-winning musician and fellow Kentuckian. Tyler sent Sturgill a group of his songs, then went to visit him in Nashville.
“And he said, ‘There’s this sound. I know what you’re trying to get at, the mountain sound,’” Tyler recalled. “’So I asked, ‘What are you doing?’”
Intrigued, Sturgill enlisted the aid of Ferguson, the Grammy Award winning sound engineer. They assembled a band that included multi-instrumentalists Stuart Duncan, Michael J. Henderson and Russ Pahl, bassist Michael Bub and Miller on drums, of course, and helped Tyler make a debut album of consequence that announces an authentic new voice.
“I was writing an album about being in the mountains,” Tyler said. “I wanted it to have that gritty mountain sound. But at the same time, I wanted a more modern version of it that a younger generation can listen to—the people I grew up with, something I’d want to listen to.”
