[Jessie Bell Photography]

Guitarist Tyler Grant’s seventh album, Flatpicker, is due out March 28, 2025. The album’s single, “Goat Canyon Trestle,” is out now and it delves into some turn of the century history that Grant unearthed.

Grant told The Bluegrass Situation about the track:

I wrote this uptempo bluegrass song to tell the story of the largest wooden trestle ever built, which still stands in the Mojave Desert of Eastern San Diego County. It’s also about the “Impossible Railroad” conceived by sugar and shipping magnate John D. Spreckels in 1906 and completed in 1919. History songs are tricky, and I am very proud of this one. The moral of the story is: If you take on the desert, it will always win.

Grant spent years touring with Abigail Washburn, Adrienne Young & Little Sadie, as well as the Drew Emmitt Band (co-founder of Leftover Salmon), which subsequently evolved into the Emmitt-Nershi Band (featuring Bill Nershi of The String Cheese Incident). These Colorado-based acts lured him to the Rocky Mountains, where he has lived since 2009. 

On Flatpicker, several songs “tell of the human experience of longing for home and personal connection.” Others “tell stories of more musical adventures in the realm of civilization.”