Five years after his first session for The Influences, Tyler Ramsey joined us at the same TakeRoot festival and recorded a new one, with covers of Ron Sexsmith’s Tell Me Again and Neil Young’s Sail Away and his own We Were A Small Town. That song is from his new stunning Phil Ek produced record New Lost Ages.

The article that accompanied Tyler Ramsey’s first session opened with a line about how he and his family moved closer to nature. That same nature just hit his hometown hard, weeks before this new session. Since he and I last saw each other, a lot of things happened. ‘A pandemic, we’ve had a big flood two, three years ago—and now I have two children. And recently, we got hit by that Hurricane Helene. I was out on tour with my band when it happened, and we came home to just total devastation. So, yes, it’s been a lot.’

‘We knew there was a storm coming. No one knew anything about how bad it was going to be. I couldn’t even have imagined what it was, you know? Nobody could have. We live on a creek. But we’re up above high enough that the house is fine, and the bridge might wash out. That happened the last storm—we lost our bridge and had to rebuild it. But this was just… The power went out. The storm was super intense. Wind, tornadoes, massive flooding—beyond anything anyone’s ever seen in that area.’

‘Before the storm came in, it was already raining. Storm comes in, all the water from the mountains comes down and just builds up and up and up until it gets to the big French Broad River, where it just devastated all those towns, you know. The amount of trees that came down is just… We had a car get crushed by a tree in our driveway. And a relative had a tree go through the middle of her house, you know. I never would have thought to worry about those things.’

‘We made it home as soon as we could. So many roads were washed down. Highways were washed out. But we made it home, and our family was okay, and parents were okay. But, it’s just devastating for the area, friends that own businesses, and people lost their houses and a lot of people died.’

‘Ron Sexsmith is seasoned, like the way his voice and his guitar work together.’

“I got to see Ron Sexsmith for the first time like last year. He came to The Grey Eagle, which is a little listening room in Asheville. And man, he just blew me away. He’s seasoned, like the way his voice and his guitar work together. It’s like hearing an old jazz musician or something, you know, interpreting his own songs in this really incredible way. I fell in love with his music a long time ago. His record Blue Boy was really big for me. And that’s what this, that song was on. So, yeah, I love him.’

‘That sounds like me in there.’

‘I didn’t latch on to Neil Young until I was already in college. But I feel like I’ve got a similar kind of voice. My voice has, I don’t know what it is about it, but sometimes when I hear people sing, I’m like: “Oh, that sounds like the way my voice works.” Physically, it just comes out through my nose, or I don’t know what it is.’

‘So, I felt that about Neil Young. I felt that the first time I heard Mark Kozelek. I heard that from the other room, and I was like, “That sounds like me in there.” But I love Neil Young. I’ve gotten to play shows with him. With Band of Horses, we got to tour with him. So, I got to do the Bridge School Benefit and stuff like that.’

‘And this song, Sail Away, I started doing earlier this year. I was touring with an artist named Leslie Stevens from Los Angeles. She’s a fantastic singer and guitarist and songwriter. I just thought with her voice, that would be a good song for us to do together. So, we were doing that as a duo or as a three-piece. I had my friend Brian playing pedal steel too.”

Going all out and not letting things slide.

“I bumped into Phil Ek, who was the producer of Fleet Foxes and the Shins and Band of Horses’ first couple records. And I got to work with him a little bit when I first joined that band. But I bumped into him out in Seattle. I was playing a show, and we just talked for a while. I gave him a copy of For The Morning, and he liked it. We decided we were going to do something together.”

“So, I really went all out on this, you know. I wanted to use a producer, and went out to Seattle to record and used the musicians that he hired. It did exactly what I wanted it to do, which was – I made a record that I’m incredibly proud of. I knew the songs were my best songs that I’ve written. At least I felt that way.”

And so Ramsey went to Ek, who then made these songs them sound that way. Tyler Ramsey gave away a little bit of the control, maybe. “I wanted to be out of my comfort zone. Sometimes I kind of hold back on some things. Maybe I didn’t know how to work hard enough to get the right vocal take or something like that. But Phil said: “You’re going to do this until it’s right.” And it shows on the record.”

“Some of those vocal takes were sung over and over and over again until I got it right. And he very much made it sounding really good. So I’m really happy. He pushed me in a lot of ways. Things that I would have let slide he did not let slide.”

Tyler Ramsey will be on tour in January

This January, Tyler Ramsey will be on tour again – find all the dates and tickets on his website.

Photos

Keep watching

Thank you for watching and enjoying this session. You’ll probably like some other sessions from The Influences’ archive too, like these earlier ones we filmed at TakeRoot festival.