Tyler Ramsey and Carl Broemel

BIOGRAPHY

Best known of course as guitarist in My Morning Jacket, Louisville, KY’s Carl Broemel has released a series of solo recordings over the past two decades, as well as such collaborative efforts as …Thanks Y’all, a 2023 live album recorded over five shows performed with Athens, GA’s Futurebirds. Meanwhile, Asheville, NC-based singer-songwriter-guitarist Tyler Ramsey, has earned praise for his former role as songwriter and lead guitarist in Band of Horses as well as an evolving solo body of work that includes 2024’s acclaimed New Lost Ages, hailed by Americana UK as “a gentle indie-folk gem.”

The two first met when Band of Horses supported My Morning Jacket on tour in 2012. Broemel marveled at Ramsey’s technique, the sound, chord voicings, and deep feelings he would pull out of his guitar. They discussed recording during a pair of well-received 2019 tours together, but were challenged to find times when both were free from other obligations. The stars finally lined up during the pandemic, the compulsory lockdown allowing them to begin exchanging tracks.

“Since we were both at home, we started sending songs back and forth, and the album just kind of built from there,” Broemel says. “Tyler would send me one track of guitar, I sat with it and then wrote a whole other guitar part that just kind of weaved in and out of what he did. We kept doing it and slowly accumulated more and more pieces of music.”

“I sent him a couple of songs that I was messing around with,” Tyler Ramsey says, “and when he sent back his ideas on top of them, it was just magical. Like, exactly what was needed to fill in the spaces that needed to be filled in.”

In 2024, Broemel and Ramsey returned to the project in person at Broemel’s home in Nashville. Though conceived and begun in the most modern way possible, the album has the feel of a lost private stock classic akin to the work of iconic acoustic guitarists like Clarence White, John Fahey, Michael Hedges, Leo Kottke, Bert Jansch, and John Renbourn. Stark yet intricately arranged pieces such as “In The Willows” and “Elizabeth Brown” are rich with a great depth of feeling and artistic invention, expertly encapsulating the two veteran guitarist-songwriters’ mutual admiration and effortless compatibility. Music at its most elemental, with Celestun, Broemel and Ramsey strip away artifice to unlock and explore deeply personal themes of wanderlust and familial love, of the bonds of friendship and the gradual accumulation of creative ideas.

“We don’t step on each other’s toes,” says Broemel, “we kind of fit together like puzzle pieces. Maybe that sounds grandiose, but that’s how it feels to me when we’re playing. We don’t even have to talk about it.”

“We just mesh together in a way that I can’t even really explain,” says Ramsey. “I feel like there’s some magical connection between our two things, it just makes me smile and satisfies some itch as far as things that I would like to hear on the music that I write. I think he feels the same way about what I do. When I put a part to one of his songs, we both have this feeling like that was exactly what was missing.”