Tyler Lyle - The Transcendentalists Pt. 1 (2023)

I finished recording The Floating Years much like I finished recording The Golden Age & The Silver Girl, on the precipice of a massive life change. In 2011, I recorded a record with a wounded heart two days before getting on a plane and moving from Atlanta to Los Angeles. In 2018, I finished recording a few days before my son Beau arrived. Now my son is five. I've survived the transition into parenthood. We've also collectively survived a global pandemic, but this week specifically marks my wife's 12th and final chemotherapy treatment for cancer. It has been a year that I couldn't have imagined, yet here we are, five years into the unimaginable.
I'm releasing this record in parts. This is part one. This is not about holding tensions, it is about crossing thresholds. Today is for acknowledging the changes- the people we've had to become, the selves we've been forced to leave behind, and yet the seeds of a new self we carry onward in our journey. I'm marking time this way because it's what I've always done-construct a project out of questions I can't resolve any other way, but also because the last five years have been a time of radical transformation and I want to acknowledge it with a Libation to the wild gods of time and motion- an offering of thanks for safe passage though and a commitment to the path that continues. We would not walk willingly thorough all the portals necessary to become ourself. But, if we weren't sometimes dragged, how could we ever know what life means in its utmost. Thank you for your support through the years. I'm beyond grateful to be able to still make music 20 years after writing my first songs in the margins of my spiral notebooks in high school. The essential admission of the soul is that the self is not its final authority.