Songs We Love: Cale Tyson, 'Somebody Save Me'
We don't tend to give much thought to how aesthetic choices shape the sounds and self-presentations of artists working in the country tradition. Countrified musicians strike us as guileless and natural, as though they're simply living out their cultural and musical birthrights. It's easier to wrap our heads around the flaunted elasticity of pop performers, who always seem to be fashioning and refashioning themselves into timely, new incarnations.
None of those notions really applies to Cale Tyson, a singer-songwriter who's made a mark on Nashville's youthful indie country scene over the last half-decade. Despite growing up in Fort Worth, Texas — home to a honky-tonk that bills itself as the world's largest — Tyson nursed an adolescent distaste for country music and played in screamo bands, only beginning to change his mind about the aesthetic appeal of twang when he, like countless other indie kids, fell under the spell of Bright Eyes' steel-guitar-laced, bohemian emotionalism.
After transferring to a college in Nashville, Tyson took up vintage, tear-in-your-beer honky-tonk records as a template for his first couple of solo projects, posing with a cowboy hat perched on his head or lying on the table next to him in the cover, which features the horn-accented, hangdog country-soul ballad "Somebody Save Me," points toward new stylistic and songwriting possibilities, and he tells NPR that his muse is already beginning to lead him down other paths.
