Kevin Bronson on April 14th, 2021

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Texas native Cale Tyson ditched the twang but not the hat when he moved from Nashville to L.A. In 2019, he released two spectacularly melancholic EPs, “Narcissist” and “Who Hurt You?” And today he returns with his first single since, “Alone.”

It’s only tangentially a song about being lonely — the beautifully glacial tune actually comes from the feeling that one’s lover is, ahem, otherwise involved. “I don’t think you’re alone / Silhouettes in your home / Faded voices, dangerous choices / I don’t think you’re alone,” Tyson sings.

“‘Alone’ comes from a place of jealousy and insecurity, like so many things in life,” the songwriter says. “It’s about being convinced that your lover (or ex-lover) is seeing someone else and how that can potentially mess with your head. I wanted it to be kind of spooky, too, though — not necessarily just all doom and gloom. To me, it kind of has that character-slowly-going-insane-in-a-film-noir-horror-film vibe to it. But it’s a song. And it’s pretty.”

So is the video, directed by Manuel Mancilla in San Buenaventura, Mexico. “The director’s mom had a beautiful house in the middle of the town and would cook insanely delicious meals for us each day,” Tyson says. “We ended up shooting the thing in two brutally long days and left with the worst sunburns of our lives.”

Recorded at Lucy’s Meat Market in L.A., “Alone” was engineered by Pete Min, with Tyson backed by bassist Aaron Stern, guitarist Juan Solorzano and percussionist Ben Lumsdaine.

||| Watch: The video for “Alone”