If you're a music fan in Music City, there's plenty to look forward to in 2010, and not just because it's finally done being 2009 and, by extension, the dreaded Aughts. Not only do we already have some great touring acts slated to darken our club doors in the early months of the year — Aretha Franklin, Tegan and Sara, Screaming Females, Beach House and Quasi among them — we've also got a slew of new local albums to look forward to as well. With new full-lengths expected from Tristen, Hands off Cuba, Bad Cop, Velcro Stars, Heavy Cream, Eureka Gold, And the Relatives and Kelli Shay Hix (to name but a few), the new year is already shaping up splendidly. To help kick things off, we've focused our scopes on a few of the brightest points in this year's constellation of local talent — 10 artists to watch for in 2010, and 10 more reasons we love calling Nashville home.

GUITAR HERO-IN-TRAINING: TYLER BRYANT

An 18-year-old dude fanatical about playing guitar is certainly nothing groundbreaking, but how many have already played 600 shows, can boast winning the Robert Johnson guitar award for best blues guitarist in the country (at 16), have opened for the likes of Erykah Badu, Paul Simon and Styx, namecheck Lightnin' Hopkins as an influence, and are currently nursing a crush on Heart's Nancy Wilson? Meet Tyler Bryant, a guitar wunderkind from Honey Grove, Texas, who's spent the last year in Nashville training for an industry takeover the old-fashioned way — with a slow burn.

By 11, Bryant had convinced aging Texas blues legend Roosevelt Twitty to teach him how to play the blues. Turns out Bryant didn't need much teaching. Soon the two guitarists had their first gig at a Paris, Texas, nightclub, where they played for $100 and two steaks. "The Paris news was there and did a story, and called us the Blues Buddies," Bryant says with a laugh. By 13, Bryant was on the industry's radar for his preternatural ability to morph from mimicking Eddie Van Halen one second to Stevie Ray Vaughan the next. But rather than ship their future Jonny Lang off to L.A. or New York at the first sign of commercial viability, his parents, manager and interested parties agreed that Bryant should simmer a little, grow up a lot and actually evolve as an artist first. Twitty's health began to suffer, so Bryant formed a band on his own with the only players who could keep up with him — musicians his dad's age or older.

While his friends were getting into punk and grunge, Bryant gravitated to Hendrix and The Black Crowes. "I thought I could probably put my own twist on this and make something kids my age would like. ... I mean, it's cool having a crowd of people my parents' age, but it's not as fulfilling as having a crowd of 13- to 19-year-old girls."

Nashville and its abundance of players was an easy fit. "There are a handful of people in the country who can touch what he has," says manager Tim Kaiser. "We wanted to round that out with better songs and a better band. Move him to Nashville, adjust him as a young man, and let him get his feet on the ground."

In Nashville, a Belmont backing band (one finally composed of people his own age) was a phone call away, while a slower pace and numerous co-writers — among them famed Kings of Leon scribe Angelo — awaited. Bryant now has his first cut, co-written with Angelo and American Bang singer Jaren Johnston, which will appear on the band's Warner Bros. debut. He also has a song on Guitar Hero. In the meantime, he fields major-label offers but hasn't settled on anything yet. His current obsession remains figuring out his position in a long line of ax wielders.

"I don't feel like there's any young guys doing this," Bryant says. "I mean, there's a lot, but no one's really out in the public eye saying, 'Check it out, this is guitar.' In a lot of modern music there's not a lot of guitar solos like back in the day with Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, when they were wearing that proud. There's not a lot of young rock 'n' roll guys. I wanna be one of those guys who brings back guitar." TRACY MOORE

TENNESSEE SONGBIRD: ASHLEY MONROE

A few years ago, Ashley Monroe's debut album, Satisfied, seemed to be too country for mainstream country, and that's a real shame. But here's the twist: The same honeyed, heart-rending lilt that got a tepid reception at country radio has caught Jack White's ear — and Brendan Benson's and Trent Dabbs' and others' — since. Without her changing a thing, indie-pop and rock knocked on her door. A duet EP with Dabbs, a spot on last year's Ten Out of Tenn tour and — the real kicker — a prominent guest vocal role on an old-timey Raconteurs track and video (which had her harmonizing with Benson) were just the beginning.

"We automatically hit it off, and we could tell that our voices sounded good together," Monroe says of Benson. "Then at the video shoot we would take these little breaks ... and I got Jack's guitar and started writing a song and Brendan came over and we started writing a song together. And then we just wrote pretty much every day for the next three months." They got some 15 songs out of it, which they plan to release this year. Pop nuggets like "Grey" are closer to '70s AM gold than Monroe has ever gotten before. "[Brendan] is, you know, a rocker," she says. "And I'm very East Tennessee. And it's really interesting and really fun to put those together."

With any luck, that won't be the only new album with Monroe's name attached to it. "This year I for sure just want to focus on my record," she says. She's considering taking another chance on a major label, but this time, she emphasizes, "the label's not in Nashville." Material's no problem; she's written plenty. What she needs is the right producer to help her get an "instrumentally just very simple, beautiful and clean" Eva Cassidy Songbird-like aesthetic.

Monroe's presence is still felt in country music through Opry appearances and songwriting successes, like Jason Aldean's No. 1 single "The Truth" and a pair of co-writes on Miranda Lambert's Revolution. She sounds good-naturedly surprised that she's been tapped to write with more straight-ahead pop guys Josh Kelley and Tyler Hilton, but game nonetheless, "It's just funny, because my melodies will be country and ... we'll just see," she says. And so will the rest of us. JEWLY HIGHT

INDIE MONARCHS: KURT WAGNER AND CORTNEY TIDWELL

If you follow local music — or independent music in general, for that matter — the names Kurt Wagner and Cortney Tidwell need no introduction. Over the past five years, Tidwell, an enigmatic chanteuse with a celestially beautiful voice, has caught the attention of critics and audiences both here and across the pond, while Wagner, as auteur of "Nashville's most fucked-up country band," Lambchop, has become indie-rock royalty. Having such talent accessible within the local music community is what redeems insanity like guns in bars, and if you're one of the lucky few who caught Wagner and Tidwell onstage at The Basement last year sharing vocal duties on a rendition of Don Williams' "I Believe in You," then you understand the perk.

Of course, a casual one-off duet between the two comes as little shock. Wagner lent his gravelly pipes to a track on Tidwell's 2006 debut Don't Let Stars Keep Us Tangled Up, the two are European labelmates on City Slang, and they happen to share some of Nashville's finest musicians in their respective backing bands — including Ryan Norris, William Tyler and Scott Martin, whose collective credits, from The Silver Jews to The Privates, read like an all-star list of Music City's most reputable independent artists. Given such close associations, a full-fledged Kurt-and-Cortney collaboration almost seems inevitable. But it wasn't until the fateful Basement performance that the light bulb went off and set an exploratory phase in motion that, God willing, will bring about a duets album. At press time, rehearsals are on the books, and hopefully studio sessions will follow, but it's still too soon to know how this record will take shape. In these early stages, we can only hope it does, as the project is still framed with question marks: What will the nature of the material be? What musicians will they tap to contribute? When will this effort see the light of day?

All we can say for certain at the moment is that the pair are considering both originals and cover material with a personal connection to Tidwell's musical family roots — which extend deep into Nashville's soil. Considering who's involved, this is easily one of the most exciting projects potentially in the works for 2010. Keep your fingers crossed that it does, indeed, come to fruition. ADAM GOLD

SOCRATES OF THE HOUSE SHOW CIRCUIT: DANIEL PUJOL

When talking to Daniel Pujol, it becomes swiftly apparent that he's one of those musicians for whom creating art is less a sweet way of passing the time and more an active expression in what it means to be, like, human and stuff. Could it be that this artist in the populous stable of local D.I.Y. punkers known as Infinity Cat is a part of that all-too-rare breed? You know, the breed of musicians who are politically informed and culturally conscientious?

"What if being informed was as important a value as freedom in American political culture?" Pujol posits when asked to muse about the future. "What if kids were taught where and how to vote and stay informed on local and state elections throughout compulsory education?"

Pujol is easily among the most prolific artists in the local rock scene. In addition to performing his solo material with help from cohorts Joey Scala, Greg Meredith and Sean "To the Wall" Thompson, Pujol also plays with Skunkape, Saigon Baby/Wizardz and World Peace. But perhaps the most visible of his projects is Infinity Cat's beloved coed trio MEEMAW, who recently reunited for a show at The End. "Well, we just kind of do what we want, so we're playing a show," says Pujol about the prospect of resurrecting MEEMAW full time. "We don't know the future until we feel it. It's like commuting by bus, but it's the bus."

Most typically released on cassette or vinyl, Pujol's material hails from the Lou Reed School of Gritty, Clever and Compelling Songwriting: It's raw and lo-fi but rich with satisfying gang-vocal choruses, intoxicating riffs and punk-pop urgency. And in addition to being a gifted songwriter, Pujol is something of a scribe and Internet-generation philosopher — the Socrates of the house-show punk scene, if you will. He contributes to local rock blog Nashville's Dead with lucid screeds known as "Shreditorials" — he describes them as "Jeff Foxworthy's iPod writing A Modest Proposal" — and has put out a collection of poems, cartoons, essays and various musings known as Meta Motor Speedway: The Bristol Sessions, available at Lulu.com and at Pujol's shows.

On his writing, he says simply that he does it because, "different mediums let you express some ideas better than others," and, perhaps more ambitiously, "what gets talked about in the public domain decides what ideas people must exchange to communicate and build their lives in private."

Pujol's most recent release is a collection of demos known as Ringo, Where Art Thou?, and he's currently finishing a four-song 7-inch called 2010 and plans to release a full-length in the spring. Pujol's recordings are available via Infinity Cat (infinitycat.com). D. PATRICK RODGERS

MASTER AND SERVANT: JAMES JACKSON TOTH

The funny thing is, James Jackson Toth has released a whole bunch of records since relocating to Rutherford County back in '07. And he's not like the dude who buses tables at the coffee shop and "releases a couple of albums a year" that don't make it outside his mom's basement. These are real records (many under some variation of the name Wooden Wand) on venerable labels like Kill Rock Stars, Ecstatic Peace and People in a Position to Know — the sort of labels that elecit Pavlovian reactions from music critics. But for some reason, even though he was right under our noses drinking whiskey and listening to Jerry Jeff Walker within arms reach, we just haven't had the opportunity to sing his praises much in print.

Part of the reason he's been a non-presence in these pages is that until his recent appearances with H.P. Witchcraft (his Crazy Horse-channeling country rock project with Glossary's Bingham Barnes and Hammertorch's Tyler Coppage), Toth has more or less avoided the Nashville club scene altogether — an improv show here and there with avant-gardists like Chris Davis, and the last house show at Willy T's, but that's about it. Toth's collaboration with former Mendoza Line guitarist Tim Bracy, The Jescos, never ventured out of the antebellum brick walls of Grand Palace's recording studio.

Of course, now that we're watching a little more closely, there's no way we're gonna miss his next record, Servant of the Blues — under the Wand moniker — for Micheal Gira's Young God label. Servant is being produced by the Swans frontman and partly recorded by Glossary's Joey Kneiser — so yeah, we're guessing it's going to be halfway between Glossary and The Swans, which again kicks in the aforementioned Pavlovian response. If Toth keeps this up, we're going to have to change our socks, because the drool is starting to pool around our ankles. SEAN L. MALONEY

FUNKY HEARTBREAKER: YA ZA

Say what you will about Facebook's recent redesign — we honestly don't need to know every time someone scoops virtual poop in Farmville — but without the social network's constant tinkering and full-blown Twitter-philia we might not have discovered Ya Za. The up-and-coming vocalist left a link on a mutual friend's wall, and being the Nosy Nancies we are, we followed that link down the rabbit hole. What we got was "Funky Heartbreaker," a stunning slice of nu-disco dance pop and a new favorite artist who might not have pinged our radar otherwise.

The north Nashville native — real name Ilyasin Zarifa — falls squarely in line with the tide of dancey electronic pop that seems to be raising all the ships here in the port of Music City. Think chart-topping ex-pat Ke$ha, only with less reliance on shock tactics and superstar producers and more reliance on a slinky sexuality that's a bit more subtle than screaming, "Show me your dick!" The group of tunes that found its way onto Ya Za's debut album Bipolar in Stereo — despite what the title might imply — is a cohesive exploration of love and life in the 21st century, a digital age diary where swirling synths and booming drums are as much a part of the vocabulary as nouns and verbs.

While tunes like "Socialite" — featuring Scene favorite Future the Artist — or "Like Music" would not be out of place boomin' over the system as the sun rises on the after-after-after-party, there's more going on in the lyrical space than one expects from hands-in-the-air party music. There's a palpable tension between Ya Za the party girl and Ya Za the real person with real responsibilities waiting outside the club doors, and that tension makes for more than just a flash-in-the-pan pop style. Sure, we're a little loopy for the songs on Bipolar, but a huge part of the appeal lies in knowing that we've got Ya Za in our live feed and that we're only a click away from whatever hotness she's cooking up next. SEAN L. MALONEY

BLUES BARDS: SILVER LIONS 20/20

"Perhaps the loudest and most aggressive blues-based music ever" is how the website Allmusic described Chet Weise's previous band, The Immortal Lee County Killers. His new venture, Silver Lions 20/20, lives up to that potentially hyperbolic claim — their version of sloppy, raucous slide-guitar punk amplifies the blues' moodiness and swagger. A typical Lions performance features heavily riff-based originals, covers of everything from Wilson Pickett to Blue Cheer to Mudhoney, and at least one guitar held up to an amp for maximum feedback. It's surprising, then, that the band hasn't earned more attention. But all that may change this year. The group will record in Weise's basement studio in April, and they expect to have something out on San Francisco's Classic Bar Music by the summer.

The Silver Lions were born of an impulsive union between Weise and Craig "Sweet Dog" Pickering, a former drummer for R.L. Burnside and T-Model Ford. "I've known him forever. I was on tour playing by myself, as a one-man band. I pulled into Tuscaloosa, called Sweet Dog up, 'Hey, you wanna start a band? Well, we're playing tonight.' "

In December, they expanded to include Tuscaloosans Matt Patton (bass) and Ronnie Lee Gipson (guitar). Of the change from blues two-piece to regular rock band, Pickering says, "It's a lot better — not so limiting." Weise stresses that their sound hasn't changed radically. "It's still the same kind of thing, just a little bit more thick."

Their songwriting process is suitably non-authoritarian: "Somebody will show up and say, 'Check out this riff,' we'll make some racket for about 15 minutes and come up with a chorus, make some racket for 15 minutes and come up with a bridge, and we'll have something it takes me six weeks to come up with lyrics for." It's natural for Weise to function as the lyricist of the group — a poet, he's currently working on an MFA and writing his first book. This combination of activities makes sense to him: "There's not much [ that is] more punk rock than poetry — you truly have to get your own shit happening. There's punk rock goin' on in poetry." EMILY BARTLETT HINES

TRANSFORMERS: DE NOVO DAHL

"We are kind of like Voltron now," says Joel J. Dahl of his band De Novo Dahl. After getting dropped from their label and being whittled down to just himself and wife Serai Zaffiro, the band are nine members strong and active once again. The metaphor points to the band's multitasking, combine-on-the-fly approach to playing, writing and producing; as Dahl describes it, De Novo Dahl is now "made up of other projects."

Once upon a time, DND was less a shape-shifting collective and more a local band suddenly clinging to that familiar major-label slope: relentless touring, crossing paths with rock stars (at one point Zaffiro danced onstage with Snoop Dogg) and inevitably having to worry more about moving units than moving artistry. Signed to the otherwise mostly nu-metal label Roadrunner, the band met with all kinds of hostility. Some in the Nashville rock scene decried their costumes and newfound pop sensibilities, while Roadrunner diehards viewed them as non-metal interlopers — or, in the words of some eloquent Internet commenters, "fucking gay."

Asked if he's disheartened by the band's tenure on Roadrunner, Dahl says, "At the time, for sure, but not really that surprised. ... I am really glad it happened to us, though. I got to learn that my long-standing fear and paranoia of major labels was absolutely founded." And though Dahl says the pressures of their contract "seemed to suck the life out of me for a while," he seems fully charged now that he and his band are free of the major label vice. "It feels very much like starting over a lot of the time," he says. "But that is all part of it. Art and creativity are not static."

And neither, certainly, are De Novo Dahl. They're nearly finished with a sharp, slightly darker new album tentatively titled Tigerlion (which may or may not be a reference to Voltron's robot felines), to be released later this year on local label Theory 8. They're also planning to release a free album of instrumental music, and start something they're calling the Full Deck Project this summer: Over the course of a year, they'll release 54 songs — one for each card in a deck, plus two jokers — for free via their website. "It is going to be a very busy year," Dahl says. STEVE HARUCH

COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS: FORREST BRIDE

You could call Forrest Bride improvisational, and the term applies almost as well as to the band itself as it does to their music. Started in 2005 as a home recording project of wife-and-husband duo Amy and Ben Marcantel, Forrest Bride quickly took on a creative life of its own. "We just sort of kept collecting like-minded friends who happen to also be musicians comfortable with the approach," Ben Marcantel says. That approach, as he describes it, is "closer to musical collage than songwriting." If that sounds vague, Marcantel offers this example: " 'Death Kit' was originally just a loop of growling tigers I made from a zoo sounds record and a dissonantly tuned toy scale guitar played with a pipe. ... I gave it to Scott and suggested a beat in the vein of Miles Davis' 'Rated X.' Later, Ryan, Amy, David and Derek added atonal synth and saxophone parts, and the result was a kind of musical horror film, but the one-note bass line and beat transformed the din into a cohesive experience, and the resulting 'song' is a crowd favorite." Not exactly writers-in-the-round stuff, for sure — but as anyone who's seen the band play live will tell you, Forrest Bride's music is grand, evocative and powerful, even if it seems shapeless at times.

Of course, don't expect the band's forthcoming album — which will include "a spaghetti western track, a musique concrete track, and a track composed mostly from a generic exercise in a jazz technique book" — to sound too much like a Forrest Bride show. Essentially, Marcantel says, it's a dub record — that is, it utilizes the studio "as an instrument to transform the recorded music, rather than present an idealized version of a live performance or a fleshed-out composition."

That kind of adventurous spirit both characterizes Forrest Bride and stands as a shared trait across a group of loosely affiliated bands in Nashville who have carved out a niche in the city's underground. "In the last five or six years," Marcantel says, "the hostility to experimental or improvisational music seems to be lessening. With the emergence of more DIY-ish locales like Betty's Grill or Little Hamilton and the flourishing house show collectives, people seem excited to loosen up and freak out a bit." As for what 2010 will hold for the band's ever-evolving sound, Marcantel says, "maybe more punch and less epic." Or, if we're lucky, a bit of both. STEVE HARUCH

RUNNING JOKE: DIARRHEA PLANET

Until recently, Diarrhea Planet was little more than a bafflingly foul band name whispered on the Internet. The series of tubes that had served us so well with relentless streams of information on every musician ever came up surprisingly dry on the subject of diarrhea planets. Outside of two noisy, pixelated videos on YouTube, Diarrhea Planet was a total mystery, forcing the curious to blindly put down cash to see them live.

We now know that the band was brought to life in a Belmont University dorm room by students Jordan Smith and Evan P. Donohue. Their experimental noise band slowly refined itself, gaining new members (the number now stands at five) and allowing the clatter of shrieks and distortion to coalesce into a free-for-all of catchy sing-along party-punk jams with titles like "Ghost with a Boner!!!," "Get Stimulated!!!!" and "Powermoves!!!!!." Their debut EP Aloha! was recorded and released in almost comic DIY punk fashion — the band scrawled the title across the front of repurposed Christian rock CD cases and gave it away free at shows.

But DP is only one small part of a greater trend emerging from the usually quiet streets of Belmont Boulevard. Increasingly, Belmont musicians are breaking with the school's reputation as a Music Row funnel and playing music that gleefully sacrifices marketability (not that Diarrhea Planet isn't a marketable name, of course) in favor of absurd rock 'n' roll fun. Spanish Candles, Spider-Friends, Darla Farmer and the similarly mysterious Dipset Taliban are among this new wave of punk and indie bands bypassing the route of glitzy university-organized showcases in favor of basements and warehouses. Whether Belmont can sustain an underground remains to be seen, but if nothing else, bands like Diarrhea Planet are redefining what we think about when considering Belmont's impact on Nashville music. LANCE CONZETT

Email editor@nashvillescene.com.