John Womack (@iamwomack)
Audio By Carbonatix
Tye Harris doesn’t miss the old T.Y.E.
T.Y.E., which stands for The Young Enlightened, is a stage name that dates back to high school. Tye Harris’ friends adopted it because they felt his name had to mean something. While he appreciates people who have been rocking with him since the T.Y.E. days, lately he’s been going by his given name.
Reinvention is a requirement for being an artist. Harris uses an example of people holding on to their high school glory days. If someone flipped through a yearbook of his attending David W. Carter High School, they would’ve thought he was the shit for everything he’s accomplished, listing things like getting a full-ride scholarship to sing in the choir, doing theater and playing basketball. “If I keep going back and being like ‘I was the shit in high school,’ I won’t ever evolve into something in my adulthood, so I always don’t like thinking about that too much because I don’t want to ever just be stuck there. It’s always present and it’s always future,” he says.
In 2025, the Oak Cliff native is catching a wave of attention for his Pushing Keys EPs. These are interpretations of songs he’s chosen with his own spin on them, just nothing but a piano and his off-the-top rhymes. Shot in a studio and posted on his Instagram, the simplicity of the videos grabbed our attention, and they have gone viral. “1000 Miles” samples Vanessa Carlton’s 2002 hit, showing off the rapper’s fierce intensity by balancing local slang words with braggadocio. “Who I smoke?” is going to be a line repeated at his shows.
Harris had a momentum-building summer, opening for Erykah Badu’s Juneteenth show while she was streaming worldwide on Amazon Music Live and Akeem Ali’s Dallas tour stop back-to-back. “I would say it helped in not only exposure, but just reigniting people that already knew me,” Harris says of Badu. “She helped me a lot. That was a big thing. That was a big moment. I took it by force and made it my moment for those 15 minutes.”
Ask anyone who has seen Harris perform locally, and they are a true believer in his talent. On Friday, Oct. 10, Harris is making his official hometown debut with his Pushing Keys Recital at Puzzles Deep Ellum (2824 Main St.), responding to the demand in the comments section to see an intimate performance of piano-driven hip-hop. Produced by TyeLand and 23 Entertainment, the show sold out in over two weeks with little promotion. All they did was drop the ticket link and saw that the city was behind him to support his movement.
It’s a significant achievement for a local hip-hop artist like Harris to secure a headlining slot. However, he tells us that there were many people who doubted him, claiming that the concept of Pushing Keys would never work. While these people wanted to invest in him, he says, they kept shutting down his idea. So he used his own money to pay for it, taking matters into his own hands.
“I took $200, [had] no beat and just my videographer,” he recalls. “I paid for my videographer, I paid for a session at the studio, and we did the video. We did three videos. We did ‘Mo City Don’ and then we did ‘Southside.’ That was all I had. We put it out and it went viral. I was like, ‘I told you motherfuckers! I told y’all.’”
Still, people wouldn’t believe in the idea.
“Rainwater [Manager of Mo3] would try to make me do shit for the club, and I’m like, ‘Nah, I don’t think I want to do that,” he says. “There was one person, I don’t know if he super believed in it, but I think I was just so persistent that I got on his nerves to the point where he said, ‘Whatever.’ And that was Shawn Cotton [founder and CEO of Say Cheese TV].”
What makes the Pushing Keys series so successful is his deep connection with them. He’s considering scrubbing his old albums because Pushing Keys are his “babies,” and he’s excited about making more, teasing a Pushing Keys, Vol. 4. The difference between the trend in hip-hop of sampling something and flipping it into a new song is that Harris’ version is just him with a piano.
“I cut the low vibration frequency that people use with the 808s. I cut all that shit. I cut all the drums. I did these songs, and they went crazy,” he says. “People actually liked it. Those guys who were supposed to believe in me didn’t believe in me because they thought people weren’t gonna like it. Everybody started gravitating to it. I’m looking at my royalty money as this shit is going on and I’m like, wow.”
Aside from Vanessa Carlton, Harris has done Crime Mob’s “Knuck If You Buck,” Luniz’s “I Got 5 On It,” Pimp C’s “Knockin’ Doorz Down,” Paul Wall’s “Sittin’ Sidewayz” and C-Murder’s “Down for My N’s,” which dropped during Black History Month and also caught fire online with over 460,000 likes on IG.
Harris wants to tell his story of perseverance because he’s proud of making the upcoming Pushing Keys Recital happen, a vision he’s had for a while.
“I’ve had this recital mapped out for a long time,” Harris says. “I was looking to people [for help] that I have known for years, like a Shawn Cotton. And then I was looking to people at the time [who] had mutually aligned paths in Rainwater, which didn’t go well.”
“Rainwater was telling me, ‘No, this would not work,” he continues. “‘No one would come to this. No one will buy tickets to see you do this. No one. This is some bullshit. You need to be in the clubs.’”
Harris pushed back and still fought for his event. When his cousin tried to talk him out of it after some convincing from Rainwater, it only fueled him more. “I’m like, ‘Man, why not? Why so many people, these quote-unquote gatekeepers of Dallas, telling me that this Pushing Keys Recital is not going to work? I kept going viral for the shit. I kept doing what I was doing,” he says.
It was frustrating that his team didn’t always offer support. It wasn’t until he was invited by Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith, who he says saw his recent virality, to attend the Kendrick Lamar and SZA show back in April, where he met Victor Barrios, owner of 23 Entertainment. Barrios had been trying to get in touch with him. “He’s went through the Rainwaters who haven’t been responding to his DMs or saw his DM like he was trying to sabotage me. He didn’t want me to win,” Harris recalls. “Vic said, ‘I’m finally seeing you face-to-face. I think we can do something special. And all we need is you and your piano.'”
Clearly, Harris’ hustle worked, and the stage is set. As someone who told us he failed piano class in college and learned to rap before he could ever sing or play the piano, he’s put in enough years in the game that his time is finally here. Pushing Keys Recital is a formal attire event, highly encouraged for those who want to dress up and attend a black-tie affair in Deep Ellum. “If you don’t have formal attire because my supporters come in all shapes, sizes, different backgrounds and environments, I don’t want anybody to feel like they can’t come because they don’t have it. Fuck it. Throw on a shirt and bring your ass like in church. In church, they say come as you are, so come as you are, regardless,” he says.
With a new single, “No Better Feeling,” inspired by the new money he’s been getting from Pushing Keys and seeing his bank account with a few more zeroes, Harris has momentum on his side. The city will champion him. We’re just waiting to tell the world we told you so.
“I try to make sure there’s not a lot of smut on my name,” Harris says. “I know it can be. I try to treat everybody with respect, whether they are coming up or they are already up. I try to treat the janitor of the building the same way I treat the CEOs. As an independent artist, I stand on the shoulders of a lot of people who have had my back throughout the years and maybe we went different directions, but I was always better off than I came in. If it was a bad vibe and if it was smut on my name, I always felt like I outworked it to where you can always look up and see Tye Harris still pushing.”
Tye Harris will perform on Friday, Oct. 10, at 7:30 p.m. at Puzzles Deep Ellum, 2824 Main St. Limited standing room tickets are available at the door.
