William Tyler Reconnects With Solo-Guitar Roots On Mountain Goats Tour

Throughout the month of April, while opening shows for the Mountain Goats, Nashville guitarist William Tyler will take the stage by himself. He’ll bring just one acoustic guitar and some effects pedals. For 30 minutes, he’ll fingerpick his way through his own winding, cinematic compositions, avoiding stories and jokes.

This will likely please guitarists. Tyler, 36, a former member of Lambchop and Silver Jews — two American bands that have pushed country music into unexpected directions — descends from virtuosic American Primitive guitarists like John Fahey and Leo Kottke, and has been heavily influenced by psychedelic-guitar pioneer Sandy Bull. He’s also played on records by Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Wooden Wand. (He opens for the Mountain Goats Saturday, April 2, at College Street Music Hall in New Haven.)

But Tyler’s music appeals to other people: fans of indie rock, film music, jazz, meditation buffs, country purists, maybe even symphony-goers.

“From an early age, I was really interested in film and music and the way they interacted,” Tyler says. “I connect the dots now that I’m older, and I wouldn’t have necessarily predicted that this was the path I would have taken creatively 20 years ago, when I was starting to play music.

“I always noticed the Morricone scores in the Westerns or the Popol Vuh scores in the Herzog movies, the way Kubrick used music in his movies … I always thought about the possibilities of those things, especially with instrumental music. There’s a power in imagery.”

As the Paper Hats, Tyler recorded a 2008 solo album on a German imprint (it was later re-issued by Merge as “Deseret Canyon”). “Behold the Spirit,” his formal debut, came out in 2010 and was widely acclaimed. “Impossible Truth,” for Merge, followed in 2013, along with “Lost Colony,” an EP that found him exploring his own music (“We Can’t Go Home Again,” from “Impossible Truth”) in a full-band context.

Like Fahey and Kottke, Tyler builds instrumental compositions around open-string drones and alternate tunings. His pieces fall together in rambling, multi-part forms, with occasional shifts in groove and tempo, morphing slowly, and with stillness, across long stretches of time.

You also recognize certain recurring themes: highways, ghost towns, nostalgia, the intersection of living history and personal history. Tyler’s albums are cyclical, often starting and ending with the same chord. With each release, his instrumental palette has grown; a new album, not yet announced by Merge, contrasts strings with EDM-ish drums and sustained synths.

“I don’t want to get into some comfort zone that is starting to get too familiar with the music,” Tyler says. “I want it to evolve. … But it does represent its own universe in a way that I think is cool, sort of like a brand, for a lack of a better word. But I am interested in pushing it without making a radical shift, not to freak people out but to keep people guessing.”

Tyler’s father, Dan, wrote songs for LeAnn Rimes, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the Oak Ridge Boys. At home, Tyler remains involved in Nashville’s artistic community, even as the city itself changes. In 2012, Tyler and his sister, Elise, a photographer and aspiring filmmaker, opened the Stone Fox, a music venue and restaurant. It closed in January.

Closing the Stone Fox, Tyler says, was “sad and emotional and really draining.” The upside: He’s now able to focus exclusively on music.

“A lot of my new album, thematically, is about the changing nature of our country and my town and the intersection of myopic growth and the fact that 90 percent of everybody else is being left behind,” he said. “My sister and I went into something that was not entirely idealistic. It revolved around selling food and alcohol. But it was inherently a non-profit model.”

After several years of full-band shows and headlining slots, the Mountain Goats tour will allow Tyler to reconnect with his solo-guitar roots.

“The opening slot is a really great place to woodshed things in a very controlled amount of time,” he says. “I want an opportunity to just play songs that I usually do electric but play them on an acoustic guitar.”

Tyler is also finding inspiration in unexpected places: Since 2013, he’s been listening to the Grateful Dead on a daily basis.

“I will listen to the Grateful Dead for an hour every day,” Tyler says. “I listen to a ton of other stuff too, but it’s almost a routine thing. They are one of those bands that are an endlessly fascinating universe. Something by them will always lead to something else that’s completely unrelated — another piece of music, or another artist, or a piece of visual art. There’s not a lot of artists like that in rock music.”

WILLIAM TYLER opens for the Mountain Goats at College Street Music Hall in New Haven on Saturday, April 2, at 8 p.m. $25. collegestreetmusichall.com.