Among the many half-dozen tattoos Ty Myers has accrued in his 18 years on earth, “probably the dumbest,” he says, is the armadillo he picked out from a set of ready-mades at a competition in Oklahoma.
“They had like 20 options they could do quick,” 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 red bandanna and put Willie braids on it,” he says — a music nerd’s reference to the fabled honky-tonk that shuttered almost three a long time earlier than he was born.
Myers, whose different tattoos embrace the identify Leroy (after Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”) and the brand of Muscle Shoals, Alabama’s FAME Studios, is a teenager with classic tastes. His 2025 debut album, “The Select” — its title nods to the Parisian brasserie from Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” — places bluesy guitar riffs towards low-slung soul-rock grooves, as within the twangy “Let ’Em Talk” and the waltz-time “Ends of the Earth,” which has been streamed greater than 70 million occasions on Spotify and is slowly shifting up the nation radio chart.
But the singer has constructed his rising viewers the new-fashioned means. In 2023, not lengthy after he began posting music on-line, his track “Tie That Binds” went viral on TikTok; lately, the platform is full of movies of teenage ladies, many even youthful than Myers, screaming together with him at concert events just like the one he performed this final weekend after a Royals sport at Kansas Metropolis’s Kauffman Stadium.
His newest single: a stately ’70s-style ballad referred to as “Through a Screen” 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 track 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, in fact, by Morgan Wallen, whose calmly villainous bad-boy vitality is as essential to his reputation as his knack for a deviously catchy hook. In Myers’ music, which he writes largely himself, even the consuming songs really feel fairly suave; he’s at all times utilizing his dreamy eyes to beam a gentlemanly sincerity.
“I don’t think I’ve ever tried to be seen that way,” he says with fun over espresso on the Chateau Marmont throughout a current swing by way of Los Angeles. “Obviously, when I’m onstage doing the flirtatious stuff and it gets a reaction — that’s all part of it. And I love clothes — style definitely plays into it too. But that’s never been at the forefront of my mind.”
Even so, one of many music trade veterans behind Myers acknowledges that he was “seeking a gap in the marketplace” when he signed the singer to his label.
“Everything in country was feeling a little 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 trying to hit the ball where they ain’t. And I felt like there wasn’t a male country artist who’s really young and really appealing to young folks.”
Why not? “Generally speaking, the Nashville community is very purist,” Weiss says. “The minute someone feels young, it means they don’t have musical credibility, which is so not the case with Ty. I mean, he’s basically John Mayer and Otis Redding in an 18-year-old’s body.”
That’s maybe an overstatement. However it’s true that Myers backs up his fresh-faced attractiveness and his cutesy social media content material with actual chops. His guitar enjoying is casually assured, and his voice has a weary scrape past his years; as a songwriter, he is aware of how one can punctuate a narrative with a burst of emotional element, as in his track “Help Ourselves,” the place he and a duet accomplice, 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 back when you’ve had your fill,” Myers sings, bruised however nonetheless regular. “I’ll get a call in the night at half past 12 / Three months later, I should f— myself.” (Hey, he’s a superb 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 faculty, he was identified round city as a singer — “I vividly remember my PE teacher making me get up and sing ‘Check Yes or No’ for the whole gymnasium,” he says of the outdated Strait hit — and at 11 or 12 he found Stevie Ray Vaughan on YouTube.
“It was ‘Lenny’ from ‘Live at the El Mocambo,’” he says, referring to the blues-rock star’s basic live performance movie. “I was like, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”
Enjoying guitar and writing songs turned “a borderline addiction,” as Myers places it, that he squeezed between going to high school and enjoying soccer and baseball, the latter of which he described as “a way of life in Texas.” But a sports activities damage in his sophomore 12 months — “Blew my knee out and tore everything: ACL, MCL, meniscus, PLC” — took him off the sector. Myers’ mother made him a TikTok profile to assist focus his consideration on one thing else; his sister, he says, turned “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 on the spot deluge of queries from document labels and administration corporations, together with Nashville’s Starstruck Leisure, the agency headed up by Narvel Blackstock, who was married to Reba McEntire from 1989 to 2015.
“My mom obviously grew up watching Lonestar on the CMAs and the ACMs, and she remembers every time Reba would win an award, they’d pan to her and Narvel right next to her and pop his name up on the screen,” Myers says. “So they knew who he was.” (Blackstock’s son Brandon, who labored along with his father and had two kids along with his ex-wife, Kelly Clarkson, died this month of most cancers at age 48.) Myers signed with Starstruck, whose different administration shoppers embrace Blake Shelton and Carly Pearce, then spent a couple of 12 months taking conferences with labels.
“I think we met with all of them,” Myers says. “By the end, I was about done with meetings.”
Weiss remembers flying to Austin to fulfill with the singer and his mother and father. “The mom recognized my name because she saw me written up in the Britney Spears book,” says the exec, who helped shepherd Spears, NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys to stardom. “That can cut both ways, but it turned out to be a huge positive, because she’s a Britney fan.”
Myers says he went with Weiss’ firm, which signed the singer in a joint cope with Columbia Information, partly as a result of Weiss understands “how to use youth in a way that propels you instead of it being like, ‘Well, he’s really young …’”
Although Weiss predicts that “Ends of the Earth” will find yourself a high 5 document at nation radio — “if not a No. 1 record,” he says — each he and Myers are considering larger than the nation viewers. “We’re talking about girls in Greenwich, Connecticut, coming to these shows,” the exec says.
But “trying to make super-commercial pop records — that would be the kiss of death,” based on 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 enjoying extra gigs on the street this 12 months than he ever has — 109 eventually depend. It’s a quantity he’s considering of commemorating with yet another tattoo, perhaps when he fixes his armadillo, since he can get it accomplished legally in Texas now after turning 18 final month.
“Some places are tough with it,” he says. “We called a shop in Austin a while back: ‘Hey, it’s a 17-year-old — think you can do it?’ They were like, ‘No, that’s child endangerment.’” He laughs. “‘Jesus, I got two months, then you’ll do it, no question.’”
