By Patti Gold

You can find him on Sunday mornings running down County Line Road.  He will be carrying water bottles and gel packets just as any other distance runner who is training for a marathon.  But he will also have something less typical: a white cane.

His name is Tyler Millard, and he is suffering from a degenerative retinal disease called retinitis pigmentosa (RP).  Tyler can see well enough to run in neighborhoods that are familiar to him, but when he runs the Quintiles Wrightsville Beach Marathon in March, he will have a guide runner holding the front end of his cane to make sure he stays clear of any curbs, cones, or other runners that pop into his central vision unexpectedly.  The nature of his condition is primarily the loss of peripheral vision.  Tyler has tunnel vision and each year the tunnel gets a little tighter.  For this reason, his race in Wilmington is only the second most grueling that Tyler will take part in this year.

The bigger, more important race is against time.  Tyler was diagnosed with RP in 2005, halfway through college at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.  Since then, he has slowly been losing the ability to do both the things he loves and the things he needs to do to have a successful career.  He replaced the sports he grew up playing, like tennis and soccer, with music.  He replaced his adoration of movies with a newfound love of audiobooks and podcasts.  But the practical things are more difficult to replace.  Tyler can no longer drive, he struggles to see many programs and websites on his computer, and he needs help getting around places that are unfamiliar.

About this he says, “I can still use most apps on my phone.  I can still use Microsoft Word.  There are a lot of things I can do.  But at some point, I am going to lose those, too.”  And so when Tyler graduated from UNCW with his master’s in mathematics in 2011, he made the decision to prepare.  Instead of finding a job teaching math at a community college, he moved home and began to plan his music career.  Tyler comments on his decision, “I would have needed a teaching assistant to help me create lesson plans and grade papers and everything else.  All I could think was, ‘Why doesn’t the TA just teach the class?’  I am not going to be a leech on some school’s endowment.”

When he made this life-changing and ultimately life-defining decision, Tyler had only been playing guitar for six years.  This is not the roll of the dice that most parents will choose for their son’s future.  But luckily for Tyler, his family could not have been more supportive.  They let him move in all of his equipment and even turn one of the rooms of the house into a practice studio.  Also, Tyler’s parents and siblings never miss a show, whether it is at a large venue, like Ziggy’s in Winston-Salem, or a smaller venue, like Eclection in Kernersville, where Tyler hosts Music Trivia Live every Wednesday.  “They really are amazing,” Tyler says and then huckles.  “I mean, I was really pretty bad there for the first couple years and they still came out to listen every time.”

Four years later, Tyler created The Tyler Millard Band which has opened up for acts like Edwin McCain and Vertical Horizon.  TMB has released its first album, “Carolina Blues”, and is currently promoting its new single, “Alive.”  “Alive” was the first song that Tyler decided to record in Nashville.  He did so at Blackbird Studios with the help of some of Nashville’s most accomplished studio musicians, all of whom were blindfolded to better appreciate Tyler’s day to day experience.

Tyler wrote “Alive” as an anthem for the Foundation Fighting Blindness (FFB), the largest organization in the world dedicated to funding research for retinal diseases.  The band has even agreed to donate .25c of every download to the FFB to help fund research.


About the song, Tyler says, “It was definitely written about my experience, but like any piece of art, we hope that the song speaks to all kinds of different people in all kinds of different ways.  It is a message of hope, and everyone needs a little bit of that every once in a while.”