William Tyler - Impossible Truth (2013) lossless

The Nashville-based William Tyler is obviously an amazing guitar player, but it takes some accumulated hours with his music before you begin to notice and savor his deeper qualities. Making an album of wordless solo guitar compositions that remains interesting for its duration is hard, demanding a range of subtle skills far beyond nimble fingers-- a fine, exacting ear for color, an intuitive sense of momentum, a mind for musical structures. These are fragile musical gifts, difficult to cultivate and even harder to point out, and they become even more fragile when the focus bears down on a single instrument: You are painfully exposed, both as a player and as a musical mind.

Impossible Truth is Tyler's second richly satisfying and absorbing record of solo guitar in three years. His finger-picking offers a lovely, rangy meditation on the power of the good old open-string drone, and if you listen closely, you can hear his searching intelligence animating every note. The cobwebbed cycle of chords that make up the center section of "Cadillac Desert" are played like an inner monologue, dimming and surging like a gas lantern. Tyler employs some of the same back-up instruments here as he did on 2010's Behold the Spirit; wisps of pedal steel guitar, stand-up bass, vibes and xylophone, softly glowing horns. But his guitar remains the single waveform bouncing through your headphone-space for nearly all of Impossible Truth's 54-minute running time, and it never once grows tiring.

Once you're fully immersed in Tyler's world, you'll probably stop thinking of his music as "solo guitar." He has an uncommon way of making tangles of picked notes ring out like the melody of a searching pop song. Many of the Impossible Truth's pieces trace the contours of a mood that feels similar to the Beatles' "In My Life": wistful, valedictory, touched by fatalism. "We Can't Go Home Again" opens with two chords that pirouette mournfully from major to minor, before easing with into a series of variations on a pentatonic theme that grow in forcefulness and confidence over three-and-a-half minutes. By the end, it feels a ringing refutation of the title's gloomy proposition. "A Portrait of Sarah", a tribute to Tyler's girlfriend, Sarah Souther, opens small-scale, singing a particularly romatic and sweetly ascending tune that eventually kicks into a romping double-time. It's a heart-filling moment, one of the only expressions of boundlessly personal joy on Truth. If there were words to this song, they would cheapen the feeling.

It also helps that Impossible Truth, like Behold the Spirit, is gorgeously recorded. Tyler's lines resonate a sonic space that sounds cavernous and chilly, like he's recording in a drafty, empty church. Although Tyler claims he was trying to escape John Fahey comparisons with this record, through the lived-in confidence of his playing and the sense of folkish ease settling into his compositions, he moves closer to the bracingly simple beauty that Fahey's music embodied. His strummed open chords on "Country of Illusion" even hint teasingly at Fahey's version of "Joy To The World," from the Christmas classic The New Possibility.

But as he moves closer to Fahey's spirit, Tyler sounds more and more like himself. Every melody he plays, like the one that opens "Last Residents of Westfall", somehow feels as it if was always there, a rare musical quality that only settles in after years of weeding out the quotations that have crept into your playing. Once you've reached this rarefied air as a player, whatever your musical mind touches will come out transformed, and Impossible Truth is music of almost metaphysical calmness, in which Tyler's guitar surveys inner vistas and notes their vastness with a kind of Zen detachment.