Tyler Grant’s new album opens with a one-minute, six-string meditation called “The Wedge.” It’s airy and contemplative, a musical sketch by a guitar player contemplating a striated mesa in eastern Utah.
The Wedge “is known as the Grand Canyon of the San Rafael,” says Grant in Episode 319 of The String. “There was a lot of energy there.” He talks about how to get there and about the geology of the region and about his notion to start composing instrumentals about western locales that moved him. “And I just improvised this piece, and I decided to start a little series on my YouTube channel called Playing the Place. So that piece is me playing the place. I'm looking at the Wedge overlook in Utah and trying to make it sound like what I'm seeing.”
Grant’s new album Flatpicker could have been called Playing The Place because it’s full of songs and tunes inspired by landscapes and histories that called to him more than 15 years ago, when he was a member of the Nashville community. We open his segment of this two-artist hour with the piece “Canyon Flatpicking,” because it’s a lovely, winding exposition that introduces Grant as the national champion bluegrass guitar player he’s long been and the western observer and champion he’s become.
“In the early 2000s, I kind of was at a crossroads, where I was playing with a Colorado-based group, The Drew Emmitt Band and that evolved into the Emmett-Nershi Band. But I was also working my way into the Nashville scene, and I had a plan of being a session player,” he says. “And I'm a West Coast guy. I'm an outdoorsy kind of guy. So my big decision, the big crux for me, was: stay in Nashville and work in the studios, and essentially spend a lot of time indoors, or go out to Colorado and start a band and play the festivals and live outside. So that was my personal lure to the Rocky Mountains.”
The West Coast he’s talking about is southern California, where Grant grew up. He rocked out with San Diego Hall of Fame staple the Electric Waste Band. He pursued classical guitar, all the way to a degree at the California Institute for the Arts. And about that time, he had his bluegrass epiphany, discovering the guitar style known as flatpicking and its heroes Tony Rice, Norman Blake,and others. Applying his keenly honed study skills and techniques to this traditional but progressive genre, he captured the National Flatpicking Championship at Winfield KS in 2009, and more contest wins besides. Grant debuted as a recording artist with the vocal/instrumental bluegrass album In The Light in 2006, featuring fiddler Casey Driesen and banjo player Chris Pandolfi from the Infamous Stringdusters.
That’s when Grant was living his dual life, caught between Nashville and Colorado, and we know what he decided to do. Asked if the move was the right one, even now, he’s an emphatic yes. “The scene is thriving more than ever. I'm in demand more than ever here, and there are so many opportunities for bands to work their way up.” Besides his bluegrass, Grant started the electric country band Grant Farm, which hasn’t reformed since the pandemic. But the slowdown proved pivotal, because it led him into a new life where he could work and play - the burgeoning world of musical river tours, chiefly River Wondergrass, which I profiled here in 2021.
If there’s one song that brings all of the threads together - the musicianship, the songwriting and the conservation mindset, it’s “Goat Canyon Trestle,” an astounding (and abandoned) railroad bridge in San Diego County, CA. With a propulsive bluegrass feel, the song documents “the largest wooden trestle ever made” and its builder John D. Spreckels. And because I had to cut Tyler’s impressive backstory about the old monument from our audio interview, I’ll quote him here at length:
“In 1906 he fled San Francisco after the earthquake, and he had a booming sugar and shipping business. And Spreckels said, Okay, I'm going to live in San Diego. It has this perfect natural harbor. Why don't we make San Diego the main shipping hub of Southern California? But there's no railroad line to the east. So he, right away, got to work with the Southern Pacific on creating the San Diego and Arizona railway,” Grant said. “But they had some terrain to cross out there in the Mojave Desert. There were steep grades, desert heat and inhospitable terrain, so (it was) very difficult to build this rail line. It took three times as long and cost three times as much. And in that amount of time, the Mexican War for Independence was happening, so the lines that ran south of the border were being attacked by revolutionaries and workers were being killed and taken hostage.
“They had every possible situation to work against. There was an actual hurricane that blew through and messed up some of the trestles. So it was finally completed in 1919 and it serviced San Diego, but LA had by then beaten them to the main shipping contracts. So Spreckels never got his due.”
Check out the video below. And if you’re interested in expanding your bluegrass guitar skills, you can find Tyler Grant teaching on the ArtistWorks platform.
Tyler's interview can be found in the second half of Episode 319. A profile of my first guest in the hour, Toronto folk rocker Jeremie Albino, is coming soon.
