Meet Tyler Ballgame, the LA-based crooner who really believes in love

Tyler Ballgame was born in a bar. One night he was plain old Tyler Perry, a suburban Rhode Island musical theatre kid and fan of the rock and grunge greats – The Beatles, The Who, Nirvana – singing covers in local clubs to fund his DIY musical ambitions, including albums of “Nick Drake cosplay”. Then someone in the crowd requested Roy Orbison’s “Crying” and the Ballgame began.

“I’d sing it like him and people would freak out,” says Perry today. “It was like, ‘Oh, people aren’t used to hearing a singer who can do this’.” From that theatrical showman part of his psyche leapt Tyler Ballgame, an elegant and soulful crooner in the Orbison, Presley and Nilsson mould. “It just became fun to create this character. It goes back to being a theatre actor – you occupy the space, and for this, I’m occupying the space of my idealised frontman from the ’60s and ’70s.”

A frontman with a voice as rich and evocative as Tyler Ballgame wouldn’t live anywhere as ordinary as Rhode Island, though. Only one track from his forthcoming debut album For The First Time, Again – the sumptuous, lilting “Got A New Car” – survives from his East Coast days, a kind of farewell to his “old self”, detailing the macabre imagery of his low-key earlier work: séances, out-of-body experiences, a pumpkin-headed clerk called Norman based on the protagonist from Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. “That was just me processing my world,” he says. “When I was in college, I loved Frankie Cosmos and those indie writers who were self-referential, who were chronicling this character they had built in their lives.”

His past duly documented, Tyler massaged his CV, took a job in recruitment in LA, moved to Venice Beach and set about connecting with the city’s sepia soul. “I knew there was an energy in LA where things could happen if you were devoted to your craft,” he says. “LA is so uniquely coded, it has that in its bones, with Joni Mitchell and the Eagles and all those writers that mined the vibrations here.”

His debut single “Help Me Out” painted the move as one of personal, financial and creative desperation – “I was self-defeatist,” he admits – but actually, Tyler Ballgame made an almost instant splash on the scene. At his first open-mic, he met producer Joey MacMahan who began recording his songs; catching a 10-second clip of a performance in MacMahan’s backyard on Instagram, Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado got in touch to offer his time and home studio to produce an album.

Assembling an impromptu band of friends and acclaimed players – drummer Amy Aileen Wood plays with Fiona Apple – songs were tracked live with minimal run-throughs, “kinda like those old Dylan recordings where you can tell the players are just being thrown in. There’s some magic about recording that way.” In front of the microphone, Tyler Ballgame took over. “I’d slip the jacket on, slip the sunglasses on and imagine I was at Glastonbury in front of 100,000 people in the rain,” he says. “By wearing a mask, it gives you licence to show more of yourself.”

Indeed, such 21st-century Sun Studio serenades as “I Believe In Love” and “For The First Time Again” have been touching audiences with their tender honesty and swooping vocals. “It’s been really humbling, to see people crying,” Tyler says. “There’s something inside us that is there to surrender to really great singers. Right now, we so need experiences we can surrender to.” His shows, he argues, are an act of public service, “where people can get out of themselves and receive something. And I’m doing the same – it’s a wheel of surrender.”