Tyler Gregory has a rare moment at home

Of the 10 or so people on the patio at Papa Keno’s in Lawrence, five are musicians present for the open-call jam under way. One of those musicians is singer, songwriter and one-man-band Tyler Gregory, who springs up from his seat, mid-guitar strum, to give me a hug. It’s only the second time we’ve met. Gregory is not one for ceremony.

He is just recently back from tour, he tells me — though he calls it a “run” or a “trip,” the two and a half weeks he spent playing in Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado. Next week, he’ll take a three- or four-day weekend, this time through Illinois and Arkansas. The next real tour, he says, is in November, when he sets out for two months through the Western states toward the coast.

This is how Gregory, 27, manages full-time musicianship, on his own or, sometimes, with a fellow musician (singer-songwriter Sky Smeed traveled the Oklahoma-to-Colorado route with him), in multiple jaunts that add up to cross-country. He sleeps in motels sometimes, more often on the couches or floors of supportive friends or fans. He is his own booker, his own promoter, and this has been his life since he dropped out of college eight years ago and moved to Lawrence from Manhattan, Kansas. It is not glamorous. It is not a rock star’s progress.

But that, Gregory reminds me, has never been the objective.

“It’s weird when people come up to me and are like, ‘Sure must be hard making a living like this. You don’t make that much money. When are you going to get a real job?'” Gregory smiles and goes on: “But everybody loves music, and there’s got to be someone to provide it. Bands tour the country, people buy records. It is a real job. It’s a lot of hard work, and I’m not going to get rich, but I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

Gregory, lean and tall, has this evening added to his height with the plume of feathers extending from his wide-brimmed hat. He’s wearing a western shirt, sleeves rolled up to reveal the colorful tattoos that stretch from his forearms to his knuckles. His blond hair is long, a few of the strands coalescing into dreads, and his reddish beard touches the middle of his chest. He looks every bit the road warrior, though there is no battle in his face, which seems locked in a smile that brings Santa Claus crinkles to the corners of his blue eyes.

As the Papa Keno’s patio continues to fill up — a tenor saxophonist has joined the drummer, banjo player and several guitarists (including fellow folk artist Nicholas St. James) — several new arrivals interrupt our interview to say hello to Gregory and welcome him back to town. I get the impression that this is a common scene at several of Gregory’s regular stops on the road, too.

“I’ve got a family out there on the road,” he says. “It’s a struggle, but it’s not a bad struggle. Whatever you put out there you get back, and I think that’s the beauty of it. You’re experiencing life so much faster when you’re going from town to town because you’re always on your feet. You never know what to expect.”

Last year, Gregory put out a full-length called Roots Below, on local roots label Mudstomp Records. Its centerpiece — the driving force behind each of its 12 tracks — is Gregory’s tremendous voice, an instrument he started building as a busker working outside bars long before he was old enough to drink. He bellows and booms over the dark terrain of “Hand of Sin” but sings sweet on the ode to his home state, “Kansas Girl.”

And beyond the heart-squeeze in that voice, Gregory makes you feel things with his songwriting, too. “Solace Lying in the Open Road” paints a picture of his endless travels, his cavernous baritone making an image as beautiful as it is lonely: After every town, it’s highway bound, falling back to the one thing I know/It’s that solace lying in the open road … It will surely shake your burdens when you’re living in between the highway and the place you call home.

“I’ll go to L.A., or any other big city, and there is that feeling — when you’re waiting on your gig, and the loneliness starts to set in,” Gregory admits. “I’ll start wondering where I’m going to sleep that night, how I’ll make it work — but the music keeps me going, because I’m in that city for a reason, and that’s to play a show. No matter what’s going on, that’s possible to look forward to. And then you wake up in a new town the next day. If it’s not all right today, it’ll be all right tomorrow.”

So he’ll start out again, more trips, more tomorrows. And in the spring, he’ll record a new album.

“There’s so much you put into it year after year,” he says. “I try to get better shows the next year and go to different places. It’s a never ending thing, endless opportunities and there’s other states and it’s a job where you get to meet amazing people and see amazing things. You’re doing what you love, so why trade it for anything else?”