when you want, where you want.
William Tyler Pours Himself Cereal Mullets
Illustration: Adam Mazur
On records like Modern Country and Goes West, guitarist William Tyler manages to evoke a feeling of American vastness, a wide-open land filled with possibility. Through the use of found recordings, rusty static, and ambient texture, his new album Time Indefinite conjures a different kind of expanse, a world of individuals connected by distant analog AM signals broadcasting from who knows where. (He’s said, “It’s music about losing your mind but not wanting to, about trying to come back.”) Last month, Tyler, who lives in Nashville, came east for a listening party at Public Records and to take advantage of the things New York does best: Sichuan, sushi, and bagels. “To be diplomatic, I would say the bagels in Nashville are ‘Nashville good,’” he concedes, “but we also have barbecue that’s probably better than any of the barbecue in New York, so it evens out.”
Saturday, March 5
This was my first full day in New York. My buddy Jake Davies, who produced and engineered the new record, came with me. He’s only been to New York a few times, but I’ve been a lot. We were trying to set some goals for the trip. Whenever I’m here, I keep a checklist of things I want to do: go to an art-house movie theater, go to a museum, eat Sichuan food, go to a good Jewish deli, and maybe get a piece of pizza. If I do all of those things, it was a successful trip to New York.
In the morning, Jake was itching for a bagel. We started looking around on Yelp, which is funny because people focus on the tiniest things to be mad about and then give someplace a one-star review while all the other reviews are five stars. We went to a bagel shop in Downtown Brooklyn that was next to the hotel. Jake got regular cream cheese and lox. I got tofu cream cheese, which is a delightful alternative you cannot find everywhere. That fueled us up for walking around the rest of the day.
We have another friend, Walker, who lives here. He suggested we meet up at the Met because I’d never been to the Met. I mean, we were only going to be able to see a fourth of it, but it’s still awesome. We spent a few hours seeing everything from haunted Egyptian stuff to very unergonomic musical instruments from the past to El Greco paintings.
I can fall into a rhythm in New York where I walk and walk all day and then eventually around six I get hungry and exhausted. That happened, so we stopped into a pizza place in the Upper East Side and each got a plain slice. We sat in a little booth where the side I was facing had an old cathode-ray TV sitting in a nook that was built for it. Something about it was very comforting: This is the oldest TV I’ve seen in use not at my parents’ house in a long time.
We had a listening party at Public Records that night. The rain was bad, and the turnout was impacted a little. It ended up being pretty chill, but everything sounded amazing on their sound system. I felt pretty good about that.
Afterwards we went to another place near the hotel called Moon Wok. It’s a Sichuan place and it was great. We ordered sautéed green beans, mapo tofu, soup dumplings, and Chinese broccoli. It ended up being enough food for five people. We ate as much as we could and then went back to the hotel with to-go boxes that weren’t going to fit into the mini fridge. Jake woke up in the middle of the night and ate some, so we got two meals out of it if you count late-night stoned eating. It was good insurance food.
Sunday, March 6
I went to a coffee shop near the hotel. I was by myself and I was feeling a little … I don’t know how ambitious I wanted to get for breakfast, so I had espresso and juice and I got an almond croissant because if there’s an almond croissant available I kind of have to buy it. I realized the thing was probably 800 calories. I ate a third of it and deposited the rest somewhere that I knew a bird would be able to finish it.
We met up with a friend of ours, Martin, who runs Psychic Hotline. He’s the one putting out the new record. We went to Mile End Deli. I’ve been to Montreal a few times, and I’ve never understood why they have such a rich history with bagels, but I want to go back now because this was great. I had a turkey Reuben, Jake had chicken salad, and Martin got breakfast because it was that time of day where you can go for either lunch or breakfast. We don’t really have “deli culture” in the south, unfortunately. We have meat-and-threes, but those are very different and very not kosher.
So I checked “deli” off my list and for our last night in town we went to a sushi place called Sushi Gallery. Nashville has a lot of Japanese places and some of them are pretty good, but it’s not New York or L.A. This place was so adorable. It was two people, I assume a husband and wife, who own it, working behind the counter. She brought out the plates, did drinks, stuff like that. We were the only two people in there and we ate for two and a half hours. At this point, I only want to eat sushi in very cozy places; that feels like part of the experience I want to pay for.
Monday, March 7
We were flying back home, and I forgot to eat before the airport, which is usually my pattern. But since I have a lot of credit-card debt with Delta, I get to use the Sky Club a few times a year. In the LaGuardia Sky Club I had a couple of hard-boiled eggs and some potatoes and a cup of coffee and ran to my gate to get some airplane pistachios. This was lunch, and I think this is how you can tell the difference between someone who travels as a tourist and someone who travels so much that they’re a captive of the airline industry.
We got back to Nashville and I wasn’t very hungry after flying. I have a habit of eating cereal for supper if I don’t have any other ideas. Since I hadn’t eaten any vegetables, I made a green salad and a bowl of cereal. I have a system where I try to mix a high-fiber, nutritious cereal and then mix in a fun cereal with it. I call it a cereal mullet. My go-to lately has been half a cup of Fiber One and half a cup of Cap’n Crunch. The cereal mullet is a good invention. It doesn’t add any nutritional value, though.
Tuesday, March 8
I decided to be brave and get a Nashville bagel. I got it from a coffee house I really like and where I used to work before I was doing music full time. It’s called Dose. I don’t know where they get their bagels, but they’re local and they’re actually very good. They have a similar texture to what you get in New York. They’re fairly satisfying.
I was getting ready to leave again because we were having a listening event in L.A. and I was going to be there for a week. But I was at my folks’ house and my dad decided to make omelettes for lunch. My dad is one of those guys who is not, like, a kitchen person, but he cooks a few things perfectly. Omelettes are one of those things. It’s a situation where my mom will always be like, “your dad should be the one to cook the omelettes” and they’ve been together for 50 years or something so obviously they’ve got their thing worked out.
It was a light lunch with a salad, and night was a return-to-the-South meal. We ordered takeout from a local barbecue place called Edley’s. It’s kind of a local chain, but it’s really good. My folks got chicken and I got fried catfish with collard greens and coleslaw. Ultra, full-on southern.
Wednesday, March 9
When I moved back to Tennessee from California, the two kitchen appliances I brought were a Zojirushi rice cooker and a Vitamix. You can do so many things with just those two appliances. They’re not like iPhones: You can buy one of each and keep them for multiple generations. Breakfast was a green smoothie with spinach, kale, frozen fruit, berries, soy milk, and chia seeds. Honestly, man, sometimes that’ll keep me going till late afternoon.
I was running around again, getting ready to leave and eating my version of the Paleo diet: handfuls of nuts and berries. It’s the lunch of the one caveman who has not successfully caught his own game yet. It probably means he’s going to be expelled from the tribe soon, which is a feeling I can identify with.
At night, I had a really nice dinner with my folks. My mom cooked salmon on the grill, and we had it with broccoli and spaghetti squash, which is a very underrated ingredient in my opinion. It conducts sauce very well. Not as well as actual spaghetti, but you can eat a whole plate of it. Being on tour is very antithetical to eating healthy, so I try to eat healthy whenever I can. I’m trying to be, like, a veggie-forward person.
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