Dan Tyminski Shares Plans for New Solo Album

It's a little bit country, a little bit pop and a little bit bluegrass, but to Dan Tyminski -- now going by Tyminski -- it's just music. The singer, songwriter and longtime member of Alison Krauss's Union Station band will release a solo album this fall, through Universal Music Group. Perhaps no one is more surprised about this turn of events than Tyminski himself.

Tyminski wasn't intending to create music for himself when the record started to come together; rather, he was simply working as a songwriter.

"I ended up getting to write with the young man Jesse Frasure -- he’s on fire right now," Tyminski shared with The Boot and other reporters at a listening party for the project, Southern Gothic. "When we first started to sit down to write, he had a take on where the music should go that was so fun and so daring. He wasn’t afraid to go anywhere -- way outside of the box that I had found myself trying to write in. And we hit it off and started writing more music. Before we knew it, we had acquired a few songs that we really liked, "Southern Gothic" being one of them."

The album's title track is a driving bluesy tune; lyrics include "Baptized in Southern Gothic, in the garden of good and evil ... We've got a church on every corner / So why does Heaven feel so far away." The song ended up being the cornerstone of Tyminski's entire project, and the inspiration for the rest of the record.

"I remember driving home, being very jealous, wishing I could do that song myself, but understanding I would have to pitch it to someone else," Tyminski recalls. "To me, it was an expression. The whole record is the truths in my life.

"That song, and a lot of the record, is holding the mirror up to society for me. It’s taking a look at the world, not judging, not saying you have to do this, or shouldn’t do this, or might be better … just an observation of some things that go on in this world," he adds. "And throughout the record, there are a lot of those truths for me, and "Southern Gothic," I thought, was the most fantastic, visual piece of work, that it just made sense to do a record."

With song titles such as "Perfect Poison," "Devil in Downtown," "Haunted Heart" and "Bloodline," Tyminski remained unafraid to tackle heady subject matter, especially if the message resonated personally with him.

"I think you have to draw the truths from your own life," Tyminski explains. "If you write music, I think you have to dig into who you are and what you’ve experienced. I don’t know that anyone can’t relate to hearing both of those voices – the devil on one side, the angel on the other, saying, ‘Eat the pie! Don’t eat the pie! Take the drink! Don’t take the drink!’ We fight with things like that. And it goes much deeper than that, throughout the rest of the record. But there’s a lot of that that I see in the world, and I found a way to express it."

With so many genres combined on one 13-song album, Tyminski is hesitant to put any label or classification on Southern Gothic.

"I don’t know what to call it. I want to call it just music," says Tyminski. "I’ve been hearing for a long time that [with Union Station,] I’m in a bluegrass band that doesn’t play bluegrass music. I tried to write country music that wasn’t country music. Its origins are in the music that I grew up on. It’s bluegrass and country message in music, but it has influences of the entire planet and everything that I’ve seen in it.

"I wish I didn’t have to put a genre to it, because there are things that clearly sound very country-friendly, and there are things that sound kind of pop-friendly," he continues, "but it’s country, poppy, swampy, bluegrassy, churchy -- I hopefully can just, at the end of the day call it music."

Southern Gothic is due out in the fall. Further details are forthcoming.

More of 2017's New Country Albums

Save