Tony Lyons will tell you he didn't choose music. Music was just always there. His Jamaican family kept the radio going. His dad came home with DJ mixtapes that lived in the

car for weeks. Sunday mornings in the Bronx meant church, and church meant sitting in the pews watching gospel choirs and live musicians do things to a congregation that

had nothing to do with words. He was a kid absorbing all of it — Bob Marley and Freddie Mercury and Lauryn Hill and Whitney Houston and the Backstreet Boys — not as

influences he'd cite later in interviews but as the actual air he breathed growing up.

That breadth is what makes Tony Lyons hard to place and easy to feel. He studied theatre at Farmingdale State College before transferring to CUNY where he earned his

degree in business, performed live from New York City stages to London, and spent years doing the unglamorous work of becoming an artist before anyone was paying

attention. He still keeps planes in the air for Delta during the week. He has stood in rooms with executives at Roc Nation and Atlantic Records. He has been told the voice is

undeniable. He kept going anyway.

The Sunnyside Chronicles is named after the Queens neighborhood Tony moved to at 28, the first place he ever lived outside his parents house. He found two of his closest

friends there. He found his footing. During the years when the rest of the world was locked inside and falling apart, Tony was in Sunnyside quietly putting himself back

together and writing the album he had been building toward his whole life.

Ten tracks that don't waste your time. Songs about the love he kept at a distance and why, about friendships that dissolve without a single argument, about grief that shows

up in forms nobody writes ballads about. There is a song called Martyr about what it costs to keep the peace when keeping the peace is slowly taking you apart. There is

Villain Era, which is exactly what it sounds like and makes no apologies. There is Pegasus, named after his favorite character in his favorite Disney movie, about wanting to

be the star and not just stand near one.

Tony Lyons has been doing this for a long time. The Sunnyside Chronicles is the first time all of it lands exactly where he meant it to.