Among the many half-dozen tattoos Ty Myers has accrued in his 18 years on earth, “in all probability the dumbest,” he says, is the armadillo he picked out from a set of ready-mades at a pageant in Oklahoma.
“They’d like 20 choices they might do fast,” the singer and songwriter from Austin, Texas, says with a shrug.
Myers has a plan to enhance the tattoo, although, subsequent time he’s dwelling within the metropolis the place his hero Willie Nelson famously discovered renewal within the early Seventies on the Armadillo World Headquarters.
“I’m gonna add a crimson bandanna and put Willie braids on it,” he says — a music nerd’s reference to the fabled honky-tonk that shuttered practically three many years earlier than he was born.
Myers, whose different tattoos embody the identify Leroy (after Jim Croce’s “Unhealthy, Unhealthy Leroy Brown”) and the emblem of Muscle Shoals, Alabama’s FAME Studios, is an adolescent with classic tastes. His 2025 debut album, “The Choose” — its title nods to the Parisian brasserie from Hemingway’s “The Solar Additionally Rises” — places bluesy guitar riffs towards low-slung soul-rock grooves, as within the twangy “Let ’Em Discuss” and the waltz-time “Ends of the Earth,” which has been streamed greater than 70 million instances on Spotify and is slowly shifting up the nation radio chart.
But the singer has constructed his rising viewers the new-fashioned manner. In 2023, not lengthy after he began posting music on-line, his tune “Tie That Binds” went viral on TikTok; lately, the platform is stuffed with movies of teenage ladies, many even youthful than Myers, screaming together with him at live shows just like the one he performed this final weekend after a Royals recreation at Kansas Metropolis’s Kauffman Stadium.
His newest single: a stately ’70s-style ballad referred to as “By means of a Display” about falling in love with somebody you’ve by no means met within the flesh.
“I knew yall would relate to this one,” he wrote on TikTok in one of many many, many movies that teased the tune earlier than its launch final Friday.
As a clean-cut heartthrob sort, Myers stands out considerably within the nation scene, which has been dominated over the previous couple of years by the burly, bearded likes of Luke Combs and Jelly Roll and, after all, by Morgan Wallen, whose evenly villainous bad-boy vitality is as essential to his recognition as his knack for a deviously catchy hook. In Myers’ music, which he writes largely himself, even the ingesting songs really feel fairly suave; he’s at all times utilizing his dreamy eyes to beam a gentlemanly sincerity.
“I don’t suppose I’ve ever tried to be seen that manner,” he says with fun over espresso on the Chateau Marmont throughout a current swing by Los Angeles. “Clearly, after I’m onstage doing the flirtatious stuff and it will get a response — that’s all a part of it. And I like garments — model positively performs into it too. However that’s by no means been on the forefront of my thoughts.”
Even so, one of many music trade veterans behind Myers acknowledges that he was “in search of a spot within the market” when he signed the singer to his label.
“Every little thing in nation was feeling somewhat mature,” says Barry Weiss, who based the corporate he calls merely Information after heading up the Jive and RCA labels within the late ’90s and early 2000s. “You’re attempting to hit the ball the place they ain’t. And I felt like there wasn’t a male nation artist who’s actually younger and actually interesting to younger people.”
Why not? “Usually talking, the Nashville group may be very purist,” Weiss says. “The minute somebody feels younger, it means they don’t have musical credibility, which is so not the case with Ty. I imply, he’s principally John Mayer and Otis Redding in an 18-year-old’s physique.”
That’s maybe an overstatement. Nevertheless it’s true that Myers backs up his fresh-faced beauty and his cutesy social media content material with actual chops. His guitar taking part in is casually assured, and his voice has a weary scrape past his years; as a songwriter, he is aware of the right way to punctuate a narrative with a burst of emotional element, as in his tune “Assist Ourselves,” the place he and a duet companion, Harper O’Neill, play a pair caught — if that’s the phrase for it — in a poisonous relationship.
“This ain’t no goodbye / You’ll come crawling again if you’ve had your fill,” Myers sings, bruised however nonetheless regular. “I’ll get a name within the night time at half previous 12 / Three months later, I ought to f— myself.” (Hey, he’s a great man, not a choirboy.)
Myers grew up in Dripping Springs, Texas, as a part of a musical household that features a great-uncle who co-founded the band Lonestar and one other great-uncle who performs keys for George Strait. By elementary college, he was identified round city as a singer — “I vividly bear in mind my PE instructor making me stand up and sing ‘Verify Sure or No’ for the entire gymnasium,” he says of the previous Strait hit — and at 11 or 12 he found Stevie Ray Vaughan on YouTube.
“It was ‘Lenny’ from ‘Stay on the El Mocambo,’” he says, referring to the blues-rock star’s traditional live performance movie. “I used to be like, ‘That’s what I need to do.’”
Taking part in guitar and writing songs grew to become “a borderline dependancy,” as Myers places it, that he squeezed between going to highschool and taking part in soccer and baseball, the latter of which he described as “a lifestyle in Texas.” But a sports activities harm in his sophomore yr — “Blew my knee out and tore every thing: ACL, MCL, meniscus, PLC” — took him off the sphere. Myers’ mother made him a TikTok profile to assist focus his consideration on one thing else; his sister, he says, grew to become “the mastermind” of his on-line presence.
The “Tie That Binds” video blew up whereas the household was on trip in Key West, Fla.; Myers remembers an immediate deluge of queries from file labels and administration firms, together with Nashville’s Starstruck Leisure, the agency headed up by Narvel Blackstock, who was married to Reba McEntire from 1989 to 2015.
“My mother clearly grew up watching Lonestar on the CMAs and the ACMs, and she or he remembers each time Reba would win an award, they’d pan to her and Narvel proper subsequent to her and pop his identify up on the display screen,” Myers says. “In order that they knew who he was.” (Blackstock’s son Brandon, who labored along with his father and had two youngsters along with his ex-wife, Kelly Clarkson, died this month of most cancers at age 48.) Myers signed with Starstruck, whose different administration purchasers embody Blake Shelton and Carly Pearce, then spent a couple of yr taking conferences with labels.
“I feel we met with all of them,” Myers says. “By the top, I used to be about completed with conferences.”
Weiss remembers flying to Austin to satisfy with the singer and his mother and father. “The mother acknowledged my identify as a result of she noticed me written up within the Britney Spears e book,” says the exec, who helped shepherd Spears, NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys to stardom. “That may minimize each methods, nevertheless it turned out to be an enormous constructive, as a result of she’s a Britney fan.”
Myers says he went with Weiss’ firm, which signed the singer in a joint take care of Columbia Information, partially as a result of Weiss understands “the right way to use youth in a manner that propels you rather than it being like, ‘Nicely, he’s actually younger …’”
Although Weiss predicts that “Ends of the Earth” will find yourself a prime 5 file at nation radio — “if not a No. 1 file,” he says — each he and Myers are pondering greater than the nation viewers. “We’re speaking about ladies in Greenwich, Connecticut, coming to those reveals,” the exec says.
But “attempting to make super-commercial pop information — that will be the kiss of loss of life,” in response to Weiss. Myers has been recording his subsequent album at FAME, the studio generally known as the cradle of the so-called Muscle Shoals sound popularized by Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and Etta James. And he’s taking part in extra gigs on the highway this yr than he ever has — 109 finally rely. It’s a quantity he’s pondering of commemorating with another tattoo, perhaps when he fixes his armadillo, since he can get it completed legally in Texas now after turning 18 final month.
“Some locations are powerful with it,” he says. “We referred to as a store in Austin some time again: ‘Hey, it’s a 17-year-old — suppose you are able to do it?’ They have been like, ‘No, that’s little one endangerment.’” He laughs. “‘Jesus, I acquired two months, then you definitely’ll do it, no query.’”
