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.
“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 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.
As a clean-cut heartthrob type, Myers stands out somewhat in the country scene, which has been dominated over the last few years by the burly, bearded likes of Luke Combs and Jelly Roll and, of course, by Morgan Wallen, whose lightly villainous bad-boy energy is as crucial to his popularity as his knack for a deviously catchy hook. In Myers’ music, which he writes mostly himself, even the drinking songs feel pretty suave; he’s always using his dreamy eyes to beam a gentlemanly sincerity.
“I don’t think I’ve ever tried to be seen that way,” he says with a laugh over coffee at the Chateau Marmont during a recent swing through 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 the music industry 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 founded the company he calls simply Records after heading up the Jive and RCA labels in 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 perhaps an overstatement. But it’s true that Myers backs up his fresh-faced good looks and his cutesy social media content with real chops. His guitar playing is casually assured, and his voice has a weary scrape beyond his years; as a songwriter, he knows how to punctuate a story with a burst of emotional detail, as in his song “Help Ourselves,” where he and a duet partner, Harper O’Neill, play a couple stuck — if that’s the word for it — in a toxic relationship.
“This ain’t no goodbye / You’ll come crawling back when you’ve had your fill,” Myers sings, bruised but still steady. “I’ll get a call in the night at half past 12 / Three months later, I should f— myself.” (Hey, he’s a good guy, not a choirboy.)
Myers grew up in Dripping Springs, Texas, as part of a musical family that includes a great-uncle who co-founded the band Lonestar and another great-uncle who plays keys for George Strait. By elementary school, he was known around town 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 old Strait hit — and at 11 or 12 he discovered Stevie Ray Vaughan on YouTube.
“It was ‘Lenny’ from ‘Live at the El Mocambo,’” he says, referring to the blues-rock star’s classic concert film. “I was like, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”
Playing guitar and writing songs became “a borderline addiction,” as Myers puts it, that he squeezed between going to school and playing football and baseball, the latter of which he described as “a way of life in Texas.” Yet a sports injury in his sophomore year — “Blew my knee out and tore everything: ACL, MCL, meniscus, PLC” — took him off the field. Myers’ mom made him a TikTok profile to help focus his attention on something else; his sister, he says, became “the mastermind” of his online presence.
The “Tie That Binds” video blew up while the family was on vacation in Key West, Fla.; Myers recalls an instant deluge of queries from record labels and management companies, including Nashville’s Starstruck Entertainment, the firm 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 worked with his father and had two children with his ex-wife, Kelly Clarkson, died this month of cancer at age 48.) Myers signed with Starstruck, whose other management clients include Blake Shelton and Carly Pearce, then spent about a year taking meetings with labels.
“I think we met with all of them,” Myers says. “By the end, I was about done with meetings.”
Weiss recalls flying to Austin to meet with the singer and his parents. “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’ company, which signed the singer in a joint deal with Columbia Records, in part because Weiss understands “how to use youth in a way that propels you instead of it being like, ‘Well, he’s really young …’”
Though Weiss predicts that “Ends of the Earth” will end up a top 5 record at country radio — “if not a No. 1 record,” he says — both he and Myers are thinking bigger than the country audience. “We’re talking about girls in Greenwich, Connecticut, coming to these shows,” the exec says.
Yet “trying to make super-commercial pop records — that would be the kiss of death,” according to Weiss. Myers has been recording his next album at FAME, the studio known as the cradle of the so-called Muscle Shoals sound popularized by Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and Etta James. And he’s playing more gigs on the road this year than he ever has — 109 at last count. It’s a number he’s thinking of commemorating with one more tattoo, maybe when he fixes his armadillo, since he can get it done legally in Texas now after turning 18 last 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.’”
This story originally appeared on LA Times
