Asking for a commitment, we’re told, will scare a man away. And if that’s true, then young men, who have the bulk of their lives ahead of them, should be particularly frightened. Why, they may ask themselves, should I get tied down now?
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So it’s amusing to hear Ty Myers, at age 17, vow to a woman to be hers “’til the end of the Earth.” Say it again: 17 years old, singing about forever. Seems unusual, right?
“Guys my age definitely think in that way,” Myers insists. “They just don’t tell people they’re thinking in that way because they know it’s probably stupid to think in that way.”
Stupid because, well, maybe they’re wrong. Maybe they’re misreading the signals. Maybe everyone else’s opinion carries some weight. “You talk to girls, you feel something, you don’t really know exactly what you’re feeling,” Myers explains. “You’re like, ‘Well, you know, this is my first time doing this. Maybe it is, you know, [love]. And so you kind of start thinking in that way. You tell your friends, and your friends say you’re an idiot.”
“Ends of the Earth,” a song Myers says is mostly “based on true events,” arrived before classmates had the chance to share their opinions. He was uncertain where he stood with a girl — “[It’s] that cat-and-mouse game where you’re running after somebody,” he says — and he went to work on a song about it in his bedroom late at night, playing an electric guitar plugged into a Spark Practice Amp, ideal for muted situations.
“That volume knob never stares at you like it does at 2 a.m.,” Myers says.
He launched into simple arpeggios in 6/8 time, emulating a Stax soul ballad. Myers had the title, “Ends of the Earth,” and he wove his way toward its payoff line, ricocheting between images of his room — starting with the “silence of the speakers” — and the object of his affection. The story was sweet, but it took a turn at the pre-chorus as the singer confessed his anger. They could get “so damn close,” then she would pull away — her lack of commitment was tearing at his nerves.
It set up a bigger-sounding chorus. The melody hit a higher peak while the words turned to pleading. If the “Ends of the Earth” title wasn’t fully clear, he promised to follow her “where the horizon meets the sunrise.”
“If you’re going to the ends of the Earth, that implies that there’s an end to the Earth — which, I’m not a flat-Earther,” he says. “Personally, I believe the Earth is round, which would mean that there’s no end, right? But if the Earth was flat, which is kind of what I’m alluding to in the song, then that would mean that the horizon would be the end. So in my mind, I was thinking where the horizon meets the sunrise. That’s where I’ll go to follow you.”
Of course, with the Earth being round, chasing her to the horizon is a never-ending pursuit.
The mix of sensibilities continued in verse two. After initially toying with a line about Sunday, Myers made her “The whole sundae /And the cherry on top.” Again, the sweetness didn’t last; just a few lines later, the singer’s heart is “broken on the floor.” Another chorus would carry it from there — the guy remains in limbo by the end of the song, still willing to follow as long as she lets him.
Myers made a simple work tape, singing along with electric guitar, and he sent it off to producer Brandon Hood (Mackenzie Carpenter, Troy Cartwright) just a couple of days before their first session together at Nashville’s Starstruck Studios. The short window from conception to recording set a precedent for their working relationship. “All the songs he writes and brings in, he writes them just a few days before we cut them,” Hood says.
“That’s kind of his MO. It’s like The Beatles, almost — not trying to compare him to The Beatles, but it’s got that kind of innocence. There’s no label people involved, there’s no publishers involved, and most of the songs he’s writing 100% by himself.”
Their game plan for Myers’ recordings was particularly appropriate for a song that hints at “forever.”
“We were trying to stamp a little bit of the timeless thing in there,” Hood says. “That’s the thing with Ty, the thing that I think connects the two of us more than anything: He wants to be somebody that’s not date-stamped.”
Myers played “Ends of the Earth” acoustically at the session for the band: bassist Mark Hill, drummer Chris McHugh, keyboardist Gordon Mote, guitarists Tom Bukovac and Kris Donegan and steel guitarist Bruce Bouton. They initially tried to take it in that same acoustic direction, but it didn’t quite have the right level of grit. They tried several other approaches, too, but ultimately landed on their own version of the Stax-style production that Myers had employed when he wrote it in his bedroom. They added a couple of chords to the chorus to create a little more movement, but still kept the arrangement simple and spacious.
“It wasn’t going to be something where we needed a wall of guitars and a wall of noise behind him,” Hood says. “The things he referenced were all very open-sounding records. I find it, as a producer, a lot more challenging to leave the space open than filling it, but I really do think it’s made him stick out a little bit more, and that’s to his own credit.”
Myers sang live with the band, sounding more adult than his 17 years and helping to heighten the tension embedded in the “Ends of the Earth” story. His performance from that session formed the bulk of the final vocal track, though he did some touch-up work at a later date. Hood would overdub a guitar solo, played with a country flare to offset the track’s blues sound, and Trey Keller provided backing vocals.
“Ends of the Earth” played well when RECORDS Nashville/Columbia sent it out into the real world on Oct. 18, 2024. It scored heavy airplay on SiriusXM’s The Highway and earned an RIAA-certified gold single on April 3. When the label decided to promote it to terrestrial country radio, an edited version was in order, trimming it from its original 4:30 length. Hood scrapped the pre-chorus, cut his own guitar solo and slashed half of the second verse, eliminating the sundae part of the lyrics while paring it to 3:23 just days before its April 10 release via PlayMPE.
Ultimately, the romantic tension in “Ends of the Earth” is familiar, and its mix of country and classic soul made it easy for Myers and the label to commit to it as he starts his relationship with broadcasters.
“There’s something about a song where you can sit down and not strain your head thinking about it,” he says. “You can just sit down and kind of relax to it. And I think that’s where ‘Ends of the Earth’ shines.”
