WIELDING MORE THAN HIS GUITAR

Ty Myers brings soulful sound and youthful energy to country

- MIKAEL WOOD

Among the half-dozen tattoos Ty Myers has accumulated 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 festival 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 improve the tattoo, though, next time he’s home in the city where his hero Willie Nelson famously found renewal in the early 1970s at the Armadillo World Headquarters.

“Tm 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 nearly three decades before he was born.

Myers, whose other tattoos include the name Leroy (after Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”) and the logo of Muscle Shoals, Alabama’s FAME Studios, is a young person with vintage tastes. His 2025 debut album, “The Select” —its title nods to the Parisian brasserie from Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” — puts bluesy guitar riffs against low-slung soul-rock grooves, as in the twangy “Let 'Em Talk” and the waltz-time “Ends of the Earth,” which has been streamed more than 70 million times on Spotify and is slowly moving up the country radio chart.

Yet the singer has built his growing audience the new-fashioned way. In 2023, not long after he started posting music online, his song “Tie That Binds” went viral on TikTok; these days, the platform is filled with videos of teenage girls, many even younger than Myers, screaming along with him at concerts like the one he played this last weekend after a Royals game at Kansas City’s Kauffman Stadium.

His latest single: a stately ’70s-style ballad called “Through a Screen” about falling in love with someone you've never met in the flesh.

“I knew yall would relate to this one,” he wrote on TikTok in one of the many, many videos that teased the song before its release last Friday.