“William’s probably sick of me at this point,” Luke Schneider says, grinning into his computer’s camera. Having finished an across-town move in Nashville, he’s visiting Huntsville, Ala.
“No, we don’t see each other enough,” William Tyler shoots back from two time zones away in Los Angeles, where he’s just settled back in after more than a year away.
The two longtime friends and sometime bandmates are on a video call with the Scene discussing Understand, an instrumental EP they recorded while spending their COVID quarantine together in Nashville. The four-song set is out Monday via Leaving Records, an L.A. indie much loved for the way founder Matthewdavid’s curation highlights common threads between artists who work in idioms as ostensibly different as ambient music and experimental jazz.
Tyler and Schneider’s EP includes performances on synthesizer, drum machine and banjo, but much of the expansive, gently shifting soundscape was created with the guitar and pedal steel they’ve respectively become known for over the past two decades. Electronic effects let the two expand the sonic range of their instruments into something grand and luminous, conjuring up celestial choirs or sparkling rivers snaking through a canyon. There are a wide range of influences at play, from krautrock to 19th-century art music and beyond, but many of the harmonies and melodies have roots in folk and country music.
Luke Schneider
Among other records — like Schneider’s Altar of Harmony and Tyler’s New Vanitas, both released in 2020 — Understand fits into a constellation of meditative work that celebrates and expands on a long history of experimenting within deep-rooted musical traditions. This movement has grown enough that it’s worth considering what to call it. Alongside several of their peers, Tyler and Schneider both spoke with journalist Stephen Deusner for a recent overview in Uncut. Deusner uses the term “ambient Americana,” which the pair doesn’t have a problem with, though they prefer the somewhat more evocative “cosmic pastoral.”
“Millennials and Generation X — people who grew up with both punk and post-rock, and have now rediscovered psych and New Age records — we’re now 20 years older than a lot of the people making the most relevant music,” Tyler says. “So it’s like we’re trying to reach for this new community of stuff that feels inclusive.”
“You could call [Understand] New Age too,” says Schneider. “ ‘New Age,’ I think, implies that there’s an intention — that’s what a lot of people would say is the difference between ambient music and New Age music. I think our intention with this music was to explore our musical friendship and our musical collaboration in a different way that we had, up to this point, not done — and also to help process heavy things going on in our lives that were both COVID-related and not COVID-related.”
The pair has a long history, beginning with living together and playing in bands in Nashville at the turn of the millennium when they’d just become adults. Tyler spent extended periods with Lambchop and Silver Jews, after which his solo career began to take off. Schneider has played in a country or country-rock vein with Caitlin Rose, Natural Child and Margo Price, and he still does so with Teddy and the Rough Riders; he’s also recently worked with Orville Peck. He got into New Age music as a way to center himself amid Price’s hectic touring commitments without relying on alcohol or drugs, and the records influenced the majestic steel sound that defines Altar of Harmony.
Neither player is one to bask in praise, but both have become highly respected; they aren’t mega stars, but they’ve played significant roles in broadening the horizons of their field. They’re not playing in Nashville all the time — though they both love getting together as often as possible with drummer Brian Kotzur and bassist “Little Jack” Lawrence under the name William Tyler Band — but they’ve both made a positive impact on local music that continues to ripple out.
William Tyler
Circumstances put the two in a house together for the first time in years as the pandemic worsened. Though Tyler was hesitant about making “a COVID record,” Schneider convinced him to start bouncing ideas back and forth. Eventually, they booked a one-day session with engineer Jake Davis in his Nashville home studio, and Understand is the result.
“Memory Garden” and “The Witness Tree,” the first two of the four tracks, are built around in-studio improvisations. The third track, “No Trouble,” is slightly reminiscent of Mark Knopfler’s theme for The Princess Bride and grew from an idea Tyler had been kicking around. Schneider’s quarantine-time study of the banjo provided the foundation for closing number “The Going Through.”
“It’s just a simple little four-chord banjo progression, and then there’s also, like, the complete opposite, where I’m running the steel through a synth-y arpeggio pedal, and William’s just kind of droned out over that,” Schneider says. “That’s a sound that I don’t think would work on one of my solo records or something, but he was into it.”
There isn’t a big promotional push set for Understand; the duo only plans to release it digitally and on a limited-run cassette, content for it to be somewhat ephemeral. But as Schneider points out, the EP offers a different perspective from other work they’ve done separately or together, marking an inflection point for both men. For Schneider, it’s about the focus on caring for his mental and physical health that’s informed his recent music. For Tyler, it’s a product of a new frame of mind that opened up as he took on an exciting if somewhat intimidating opportunity to score Kelly Reichardt’s 2020 film First Cow. The main theme came from a musical idea that, unusually for Tyler, he’d held onto for a decade — which showed him a new way to look at his work.
“There’s an acceptance of the ambiguity of your ideas, whether they’re your favorites, or ones that you don’t even have an emotional attachment to,” Tyler says. “Whether they’re charted out, or they’re just recorded scraps, you know, they can find a home with different people or different projects. They don’t have to be definitive all the time. I had been in sort of a seven- to 10-year cycle of trying to think of things to fill albums that felt cohesive together. And if anything didn’t fit that, I just threw it out.
“That’s not the way collaboration works at all. The whole essence of collaboration is give and take. … I’m probably collaborating, actively or inactively, with 10 other people — with things that could all be albums, or may not happen at all, or might just be one song. And I kind of am starting to let go of being precious about any of that, ’cause it doesn’t matter.”
