Tyler Ramsey & Carl Broemel – Celestun

Having been friends and occasional touring partners for well over a decade, Asheville, NC-based singer-songwriter-guitarist Tyler Ramsey and My Morning Jacket guitarist Carl Broemel have at long last made their full-length recorded debut with Celestun out January 15. A marvel of interwoven musicianship and testament to the duo’s singular camaraderie, the album encapsulates the two veteran guitarist-songwriters’ mutual admiration and effortless compatibility as they swap and share nine new songs of dazzling dexterity and grace recorded almost entirely recorded on acoustic guitars. Though their initial objective had been all instrumental, the natural flow of the sessions led the duo to begin incorporating vocal tracks. Stark yet intricately arranged songs such as the cinematic title track, “Flying Things” (featuring additional vocals from GRAMMY® Award-nominated singing siblings The Secret Sisters), and an incandescent version of Neil Young’s “Sail Away” are rich with dazzling dexterity and grace, Ramsey’s nimble fingerstyle picking and Broemel’s classically trained virtuosity aligning to create a predominantly instrumental song cycle of rustic beauty and atmospheric power. Music at its most elemental, Celestun sees Carl Broemel and Tyler Ramsey stripping away artifice to unlock and explore deeply personal themes of wanderlust and familial love, of fellowship and communal adventure.

“We don’t step on each other’s toes,” says Carl 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 Tyler 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 what exactly what was missing.”
 
Previously, Louisville, KY’s Carl Broemel has released a series of solo recordings over the past two decades, including 2019’s Brokenhearted Jubilee EP in collaboration with drummer Eric Hopper, and recent collaborations with The Futurebirds. Meanwhile, 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.”