I almost died the night I met Ty Manning. Not that it was Ty’s fault, I had that one coming either way, even at the young and troubled age of sixteen. But as the years went by, I recognized it for the portentous omen that it was. Later, when I was eighteen, standing outside Allen’s Hamburgers with a bottle of Kentucky Gold, watching their singer beat the shit out of their then-bass player, Ty turned to me and said the words that would change my life forever. “Don’t you play bass?”

 

Two decades later I find myself listening to Empty House amid years of my own modern debris. Books and records, every corner, every room. A picture of skull tells me all is vanity, but that’s just some other asshole’s idea of death and how I should spend my time.

 

See, some people just can’t learn how to act, no matter how many times they’ve been told. They wear some folks out, but I’ve always thought they were the best of us, the only ones that really last.

 

**************************

The empty house is an old farmhouse on Seven Islands Road in Buckhead, the real Buckhead, not that exhausting mess of glass and condescension in Atlanta. Of the 200 or so people that call Buckhead home, there is at least one honest-to-God artist out there on the side of a road that was once a trail that preceded America.

 

Empty House is a concept album in the same way that the self is a concept of the self. All art is a conjure but some art is inseparable from the conjurer. Which is a fancy way of saying that the album is honest as dirt. Empty House is Ty’s marriage and divorce, heartache and rebirth, stated plain and sung out loud. This is love laid bare, cut open, picked clean.

 

The album starts with Hole In My Heart and As Long As I’m With You, two songs (just about) written in time to be played by Ty at his wedding, which was of course a blowout concert on stage at the Georgia Theatre in Athens. A capacity crowd. Just hours before the show, still trying on lyrics in the alley behind Nowhere Bar. The happiness, love, and expectation in these songs is obvious and apparent to every fool that’s ever fell in.

 

Less apparent is the actual hole in Ty’s heart. And not in a hyperbolic sense. Ty has a very real hole in his heart, a ventricular septal defect, an atrial septal defect, and atrial fibulation, if you’re keeping score at home. Sometimes it runs like a racecar and leaks like a sieve. Hole in My Heart begins at the beginning for Ty and Kelly, which is to say it begins at the end; the end of a long, lonely highway of hard living and close shaves around tight corners. Kelly came along as Ty was in transition, between two parts of his life and literally breaking down on the inside and figuratively breaking down everywhere else. Kelly had her own struggles, as we all do, but at the time it seemed the two of them would fill the holes for each other. And so they did. For a while.

 

Driving out of town into futures unknown, As Long As I’m With You is a an upbeat road song duet that showcases the good humor Ty is known for in his songs and his life. There’s not a hint of the trouble to come because there is never a hint of trouble to come in the beginning, when you walk your bride out the stage door and head for home in the early, pre-dawn dark.

 

The turn begins with Curl Up & Dye, a punctured and pretty thing, written by Uncle Dave Griffin, the grievously underappreciated songwriting specter of Waycross, Georgia, the unlikely and forgotten birthplace of Cosmic American Music. This is a love song that acknowledges the pain and brokenness of souls that come to lay down and rest in the brokenness, find comfort in the mutual pain that we all feel when the moon is full and calling. A wheezing accordion by multi-instrumentalist Scott Nicholson and Adam Poulin’s plaintive fiddle let the air out of this homecoming and make real the fact that “your crying is done” was a lost, mistaken hope. A prayer of possibility that didn’t come to pass, not exactly a lie, but not quite the truth.

 

The truth is saved for No Home For Me Now, a steady and contemplative tune that evokes the melodies of Joni Mitchell and the straightforward lyrics of Steve Earle. Penned by another Waycrossian, the swampadelic songwriter Sean Clark, No Home For Me Now is a moment of clarity, the walking out after the waking up, the dew so heavy it soaks your shoes.

 

A long-forgotten past shows back up on If You Don’t Want Me, I Don’t Need You. A never-quite recovered metalhead from the ‘80’s, Manning gives life to his anger and frustration by reaching back to younger days inspired by Skynyrd and Petty. Guitars cutting heads, Poulin’s angry fiddle, and a shimmering organ highlight the acrimony and resentment found in every empty house where one person is left alone to have the argument they were deprived of; the things you would’ve said before if you had known at the time it wasn’t actually going to work out.

 

The title track comes by way of our exquisitely modern twist on pain infliction: the unanswered text. Manning retrieves a series of unacknowledged messages from the dregs of the digital sea, and sets them to music, filling the rooms of his empty house with the questions that never gets answered, a modern Hello Walls. “Are you ever coming home?” “Will I ever know what’s on your mind?” “Do you still love me like you used to?” “Is there anything I can do?” “Am I just wasting time?” You never get the answer you want when you want a yes or no. And when you get no answer at all, you’re left with echoes, wondering, did I say something just now, or was that in my head? The silence crowds in and never shuts the hell up.

 

But still.

 

You don’t forget. You don’t forget what was good and why. In fact, what you forget is all the bad and none of the good. You remember how high the highs, not the low of the lows. The Way We Were is a bright but dreamy reflection on the little details that make a marriage a life and the desire to get it back, to feel safe as home.

 

A beautiful bit of sparkle and groove rains down on Its Hard, a song that acknowledges the difficulty in closing your eyes and not seeing the person who used to share your bed. Connor Griffin’s staccato drums pop in and out to propel the raindrop-guitar melody before settling into a rhythm that drives and pushes the song out to the edges where it’s clear that it’s easier for some to turn it off than others.

 

Hayes Carll’s worn and weary Good While It Lasted appears reimagined as a piano ballad in the dazzling crazy hands of Nicholson, who has been playing off and on with Ty, and everyone else in Athens worth a damn, since before anyone had ever heard of a gastropub downtown. Gnarly G of the Funk Brotherhood provides the sax solo that pushes this belated elegy into real melancholy, an emotion often sought in music and rarely pursued with purpose. Here, Manning comes up for air, reclaims a little of what was lost, left behind.

 

The album, and one senses, this period of Ty’s life, comes to a close with Whole Again, originally a Bearfoot Hooker song that was written in another house by another guy looking for something worth living for and some sense that what was dead inside didn’t have to stay dead but could be reborn. Whole Again travels up and out on the back of Bo Hembree’s guitar work and between the wings of the breathtaking, gospel-drenched vocals of Lydie Omesiet, from the Côte d'Ivoire.

Empty House is not a casual listen. It’s an honest assessment of the pain of being alive, which cannot exist without the joy of being alive. We are beset on all sides by this truth, in love and in war and especially when  love becomes war. This is our truth together and this is our truth alone, in an empty house, on the side of a road that was once a trail that carried others who loved and suffered, suffered and loved.