Electrified Vinyl

For those watching meters, there’s always a dip in voltage around 6 o’clock. When workaday folks get home and start turning on their televisions and firing up their microwaves, the hum of electricity goes crackling down the power lines, lighting up the windows of house after house, street after street, mile after mile. But when the moon has been high for hours and, slowly but surely, the nearby world starts to fall asleep — that’s when workanight folks, like Tyler Bryant & The Shakedown, come alive. 

As the voltage begins to spike, current flows like a high tide flooding through the transformers and wires that stack well into the thousands at TBSD’s musical headquarters, “The Lily Pad” in Nashville, Tennessee. In a fast-moving, increasingly digital world, vintage tube gear is considered obsolete by the majority, but for those still living on the fringes of time, there’s a quality of magic when pieces of gear from a different age power up — the dim glow of vacuum tubes purposefully burning and generating heat in the close quarters of a control room. 

Experience suggests that the best microphone to use is the one closest to an idea; and the best ideas flow from Tyler Bryant & The Shakedown when expectations are eliminated, complexity is simplified, and raw energy is refined into sound that goes barreling against an otherwise silent Nashville night. Like a freight train rolling down a hill, momentum builds: A thought sparks a feeling, a feeling sparks a few words that are strung together to form a musical conversation that asks, and then answers, its own question.