![]() Supporting folk godfather Richard Thompson on a tour of North America in 2019, Walker began to feel his life had become unmanageable. “I’m resourceful for the very worst shit.” That’s the kind of addict I am,” he says. “Drop me in Butthole, America, and I’ll find the guy with pills. “It was clear from the start that I was obsessed with this shit, and I didn’t care about anything else.” By 2018, he was addicted to heroin, cocaine and alcohol. “Getting just two days sober was impossible since I was a kid,” he says calmly. When I speak to him, he is days away from marking two years sober. “But even the dorky stuff that’s about finding a mythical beast, I see it as the most free music.” If that sense of freedom is important on Walker’s new album, that’s because it comes from hard-won personal revelation. “Punk and indie obviously disarmed prog pretty heavily in the 70s and 80s. An ardent Genesis fan, Walker is one of many younger artists currently bringing prog rock in from the cold. I’m happy it came out but there’s no way I could do that now – I’m getting too fat for the cool pants.”Įxtricated from that sound, his creativity flourished through a string of studio albums, collaborations and live records – trading pastoral classicism for urban experimentalism and diving into the intersections between noise, free jazz, folk and psychedelia. “I’m a pretty self-aware and poor salesman, so I immediately shit on it. “That unfiltered hate I had towards it was maybe a bit childish,” he says. Walker quickly soured on its success – the Chicago city kid miscast as a Nick Drake-style rustic troubadour – and in interviews called it “a terrible record”. In 2015, Walker’s second album, Primrose Green, became an unexpected critical hit for its faithful, if overly nostalgic, rendering of that era. He may be just as visionary, though less hungry, but either way… this is the time to get on the Ryley Walker bandwagon.That was until Walker’s interest in fingerpicking led him to the UK folk rock canon of the 70s – the era when artists such as Bert Jansch and Fairport Convention made visionary, stirring records from the raw material of traditional English song – and he began writing and recording in that style. If the world catches on, the Ryley that follows up this album may be a different sort of person, one who knows the taste of better liquor and comfortable bedding and isn’t nearly as driven. A short lifetime of interminable practice and discipline have resulted in Primrose Green, an album of a sort that hasn’t been seen since the 1970s. Hardship and setbacks and dilapidated housing only seem to spur him on creatively. No one knows what the future holds for young Ryley Walker. The core of Ryley’s band continues to be Brian Sulpizio, guitar, Ben Boye, piano or harmonium, and Whitney Johnson on viola and intermittent background vocals. The board was barely reset from the All Kinds of You sessions before Ryley was corralling his by-then-rejiggered band back into Minbal studios in Chicago to solidify a totally new direction in his creative vision. His 2013 recordings, that resulted in The West Wind EP and All Kinds of You LP, fully express these Anglophilic tendencies. He was finding a new path refracting the British traditional spectrum, from Bert Jansch to Nick Drake, and defying all the limitations of the genre. Both efforts were impressive displays of fingerpicking prowess.Īfter a 2012 bike accident, Ryley began practicing more diligently he began lacquering his fingertips at cheap salons, permanently giving his playing aggression and tone difficult to achieve with naked fingertips or finger picks. Evidence of Things Unseen and Of Deathly Premonitions (with Daniel Bachman) appeared briefly as limited cassette releases. By 2011, at age 21, he finally began issuing recordings from his already impressive catalog of compositions. Ryley transitioned slowly into the finger-style playing in 2008. His personal life might be tumultuous and his residential status in question, but his bedrock is disciplined daily rehearsal and an inexhaustible wellspring of song craft. Ryley Walker is the reincarnation of the true American guitar player. ![]()
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