Singer/songwriter/instrumentalist Tyler Burba crafts songs that balance vulnerability with power, with memorable melodies and a richly textured musical palette that blends Americana, folk, world music and other diverse influences. Fool’s Leap of Faith by Tyler and his band Visit is their brilliant debut for Octave Records, recorded with stunning Pure DSD high-resolution clarity.
Tyler Burba is a songwriter of many influences, creating songs that feel deeply personal yet express universal sentiments. He began his career by singing gospel and performing Christian music, and he taught himself how to play piano and guitar with inspiration from the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Elvis and others. Branching into classical, blues, country and a myriad of other styles, he ultimately studied poetry with Allen Ginsburg and other Beat poets, and began a lifelong study of Tibetan Buddhism and Dzogchen meditation. These musical and spiritual influences permeate his luminous yet accessible songs.
Tyler Burba at the Octave Records piano.
Fool’s Leap of Faith features Tyler Burba on vocals, guitar, piano and Hammond B3 organ, with Visit bandmates Clint Carlson (drums, percussion, backing vocals), Rob Weston (bass, backing vocals), Stephen Affleck (backing vocals, vibes), Reed Bye (backing vocals), Charles Lee (cello), Ariele Macadangdang (violin), Enion Pelta-Tiller (banjo), Charlie Rose (pedal steel, banjo), and Sandra Wong (violin). Tyler’s voice can go from low and warm to soaring. The band shows a deep musical range, from crisp, lively acoustic guitar and banjo playing to beautiful string quartet orchestrations.
The album was recorded and mixed by Paul McGowan and Jessica Carson, who also served as executive producer. Stephen Affleck co-produced Fool’s Leap of Faith, which was mastered by Gus Skinas. The album was recorded using Octave’s state-of-the-art Pyramix Pure DSD system, mastered using a PS Audio PMG Signature 512 DAC and mixed using PS Audio’s flagship Aspen FR30 loudspeaker. The album offers startling clarity and realism, perfectly capturing Tyler’s expressive voice and the varied textures of the instruments, whether a sparse arrangement like the ballad “It’s Been So Long,” or the luxuriant string backgrounds of “Tide Song” and “Blood Brothers.”
The album sneaks up on the listener with the sparse acoustic guitar and vocal intro of “Tide Song”; then the string section enters with lush chords and the band comes in with full force and layered background vocal harmonies. It’s a song of love destined to fail: “Some baseless joy keeps dragging me back/winded by lust, and I’m flat on my back…how do you think this is going to end?” “Wake Up Blind” highlights the adept interplay of the acoustic guitar, banjo and other instruments and the sweet sound of the string quartet accompaniment. Each instrument occupies a distinct space in the mix, and, as in every song on Fool’s Leap of Faith, the dynamics of Tyler’s acoustic guitar ranges from subtle to powerful.
“It’s Been So Long” is a classic waltz-time country heartbreak ballad with pedal steel and strummed acoustic guitar, fiddle, brushes on snare drum, and a swirling bed of Hammond organ. Tyler laments, “it’s been so long since you sat there and had nothing to say/It’s been so long since yesterday.” “Again” is a deeply spiritual song about life, death, and the beyond (”let me discover with no eyes/what I could never see when I was alive”), driven by energetic strings and sympathetic instrumental accompaniment.
Charlie Rose plays the pedal steel.
“Just Fall Apart” is a classic country-feeling ballad with pedal steel and fiddle woven throughout, and Tyler expresses a timeworn sentiment: “I could drive on out of town and make a brand new start/or just fall apart.” The album concludes with “Path to Judgment,” which shifts from country swing to an all-out up-tempo workout, and “Blood Brothers,” which takes the album home with a quiet, meditative beginning, followed by the full band and string section and a rousing electric-guitar-driven finale. It’s the fitting conclusion to an extraordinary album of fearless and heartfelt music.
I spent time talking with Tyler about the new album, his musical influences, and many other things.
Frank Doris: Can you tell us how you started playing and how long you've been playing?
Tyler Burba: Well, I got my start in the church, like a lot of musicians and artists. I just fell in love with music as a young kid when I was five, six years old. I actually competed in some gospel competitions as a kid and sang at all these different festivals, sang on the radio a few times. I was in love with music at that point, so I pursued it on my own and [at that time] my [older] brother got to take piano lessons. My mom couldn't afford [lessons for both of us]. So, I used to sneak and look at his piano books and kind of taught myself. And then around age 11, my mom took a jar full of pennies to the coin bank and bought me a little acoustic guitar for my birthday, and I started teaching myself Elvis and Beatles songs on that.
So I just really got the bug as a young kid and just fell in love with music, and I've been doing it ever since. I started writing songs when I was a young teenager, hundreds of horrible songs probably, if I listened back!
FD: Me too. I listened to some stuff that I did when I was a teenager and thank god it never got released. As opposed to the songs on your album, which are poetic and different and really moving in some of your turns of phrase. I see that you encountered Allen Ginsberg and people like that. What was that like?
TB: I was very lucky. I was in the right place at the right time. I started being a huge Beatles fan when I was a little kid. And through the Beatles, I discovered Bob Dylan because I read books about the Beatles and heard about this guy named Dylan who was a big influence. And then I started listening and became totally obsessed with Bob Dylan.
Then I read in one of Bob Dylan's biographies about Allen Ginsberg, and that very week I saw that he was signing books in Portland, Oregon at this bookstore called Powell's. I begged my mom to take me there. She took me there after football practice one day, and I met him, [but] I didn't know anything about him at the time. I just knew that he was some kind of cool guy that Dylan was influenced by. So when it came time to go to college, I read an interview by Ginsberg and he mentioned Naropa University, and – this was before the internet – I wrote them for a catalog. When I got the catalog, my jaw just fell to the floor about who was teaching there and what they were teaching. And I said, “I've got to go to the school.”
I was always into poetic lyrics, but I really wanted to study poetry to become a better lyric writer. Unfortunately, Ginsberg died the year that I went there (1997), so I didn't really get a chance to study with him, but I got to study with all these other amazing poets that came through, like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Amiri Baraka.
FD: Fast forward about 30 years and this album: how did you go about recording it?
TB: When I set up the recording schedule with Octave, I didn't really know what to expect and what they wanted as far as recording. I thought everything was going to be tracked live, and I was really nervous about that because my drummer lives in Minneapolis, my bass player lives in New Orleans. We weren't going to have a chance to get together except for maybe one day before the session.
That's already enough variables to have it potentially just be total garbage. And then when you add on string players and a pedal steel player (Charlie Rose) that I didn't know…so I was kind of a nervous wreck going into the session. Then I met with (producer) Jessica Carson the week before, and she said, “you probably want to track this album” (record it by multitracking rather than playing everything live). I was so relieved when she said that.
The way we ended up doing it was kind of like the Beatles did. They would record their basic tracks, get a good solid base, and then add stuff onto it. So that's what we did. We recorded bass, drums, and guitar all live together, and then we added strings and pedal steel on top of that, and then added the vocals [and other parts].
The string section at work.
I met Clint Carlson, the drummer, in Boulder. I’ve been playing with him for the last 25 years. Rob Weston, the bass player, started out being my sound mixer and just has a great musical ear. So, I could really trust these guys because…it's one thing to have great musicians, but a lot of times you hire session musicians. They show up unprepared, and they're expecting to just read the charts and follow along and do a good job. But oftentimes, they don't put their heart into it. I just didn't want that to happen.
I wrote all the string parts and as long as the string players could play what I wrote, then I knew it was going to be good. I’d worked with (violinist) Sandra Wong and I've always loved her playing. I knew I could trust her to put together a really strong quartet, and she just exceeded my expectations. They brought it up to a whole other level than what I had written.
FD: The strings add a level of sonic beauty. Like…are you familiar with the album Forever Changes by the band Love?
TB: Oh, yeah. It's an incredible album.
FD: I got the same feel from the way the strings are arranged on your album. The orchestration just elevates the music.
TB: I've used strings before, but this album was the first time I really spent a real solid amount of time writing and composing and really making sure every measure was exactly the way I wanted it to be. A lot of times you just write string pads where they just hold long notes, which is beautiful too. But I really wanted to write something where the strings had something interesting to play, and [they] were actually another part of the songwriting.
And when you have actual people playing (instead of someone on a synthesizer), every person's got their own unique style, and they add a whole new range of color to the piece of music. With this album, I just got very, very lucky with the musicians that I know, and that they were in the right shape and the right mood and came prepared and put their own heart and soul into the songs too. The drummer Clint [even] wrote out his own parts. So did [Rob Weston] the bass player.
And then to have these string players who were so incredible, who spent time with the music and tweaked it to their own taste and personalities. And then on top of that, to work with Paul and Jessica, who were just the easiest people in the world to work with in the studio. A lot of times you do sessions with recording studios and the engineers are watching the clock, and you can just tell they just want to be someplace else. Paul and Jessica were so enthusiastic and amazing to work with.
Pay no attention to the man behind the glass!
FD: I think this record stands with anything, not just that it’s a standout in the Octave Records catalog.
TB: Well, thank you very much. I hope it gets some traction because I'm really, really proud of it, and I want Octave Records to have a big success too. And I really believe in the mission of Octave Records. I'm sure you're familiar with most of the music business now. The only people making money are people who are ripping off artists or taking advantage of them or providing some kind of service where they're selling stardom or whatever, guaranteed plays on Spotify and stuff like that. What they're doing at Octave is just a mutually beneficial situation. Recording these artists for free and then giving them the masters [of the standard resolution audio files] after six months is just amazing too. It's an incredibly generous thing, that they're investing so much time and energy and [are] willing to share it with the artists.
FD: Getting to the lyrics: sometimes they’re poetic, sometimes they’re straightforward, sometimes they’re metaphorical. I was really struck by “Again,” the song about death and reincarnation. How do you come up with the words?
TB: I've been somebody who's been messing with improvisation for years and years, but I’d never really used it that much for serious songwriting. I had a sabbatical last year, [and] had some time to work on things and breathe a little as opposed to being on a tight deadline to get stuff done. So a lot of the songs came from just improvisation. I would just sit with a guitar for 20, 30 minutes and see what came out. Then I'd go back and pick out the gems, and sometimes it was just garbage with maybe one or two good lines.
“Again” was pretty much written all with improvisation. I was singing about the state of what happens after death, and contemplating whether you're going to be reborn again or whether you want to reach some kind of state of transcendence where you transcend the human realm and you're free from all that. I'd been reading a lot of book on spirituality. With “Wake Up Blind”… I took this course about John Milton, and one of his poems was about how when he's dreaming, he has perfect vision, and he sees his beloved in his dream state, but then when he wakes up in the morning, his blindness returns and he can't see the world again. A lot of the lines are actually taken directly from John Milton or inspired by his poetry.
“Blood Brothers” was inspired by [Walt] Whitman's sense of this brotherly love, and it's kind of a love song to my band mates in a way too, not having a love song to a woman or romantic interest but just about the bond that comes from your male friends. You can actually be true spiritual companions and be there for each other without all the hangups of a romantic relationship where you're working through all your trauma and all your bullsh*t.
FD: As opposed to more of straight country song like “Just Fall Apart,” where you’re saying, “I could have held it together, but I didn’t!”
TB: And that’s kind of counter to everything our society tells us to do when we go through something really hard. We don't let ourselves fall apart. And I guess that's a good thing, in a way. But sometimes you’ve just got to let yourself fall apart, at least for a little while. I listened to a lot of George Jones in the last couple of years, so that was a huge influence for that song.
I think I came into country music late in life. I grew up in a working class part of the world in Vancouver, Washington. It was an aluminum [manufacturing] town for a long time, and then the factory shut down. That’s almost like a country song in itself. I always looked down upon rednecks and country music as a kid. I thought it was absolutely awful. Then when I actually had to work hard labor for a living, I finally got it. It finally made sense. [After] a full day of hard work, this music is really soothing and really satisfying to listen to. I'm not influenced by today’s country pop so much. All my country influences basically stopped in 1975 with people like George Jones and Johnny Cash.
FD: Anything else you’d like to add?
TB: This album wouldn’t have happened without Steve [band member Stephen Affleck] because he got into audiophile equipment in the last couple of years and discovered Paul's YouTube channel. He found out about Octave Records and their offer to record people. So we sent them some stuff. But I've been in the business for a long time and I had no expectation that I was ever going to hear back from them. I was like, “This is too good of a deal.” They probably get a million submissions and they probably going to think my music's too weird.”
But within two days I heard back from Jessica. I went to college in Boulder and spent 10 years of my life there. So it was like a homecoming, but the best kind of homecoming, where you go home again but it's better than the first time you went. Paul was amazing to work with and these great musicians…it was just a dream come true. The best recording experience I've ever had in my life.
FD: Sometimes the good guys do win.
TB: It's nice when that happens every once in a while, to meet somebody who's successful but actually deserves it and is a good human being and has a really great vision for a better world, and is actually making it happen. That's a pretty rare thing to find. So it's really life-affirming. I feel very lucky.
All images courtesy of Stephen Affleck.
