12/25/2023 0 Comments Ryley walker sweet satisfaction![]() Folk dudes play with jazz dudes, jazz dudes play with noise dudes. The cool thing about Chicago music is it seems to be a Midwest thing. There doesn’t really need to be a folk scene anymore. And also the folk scene is kind of … it’s not like your classic folk scene like Greenwich Village where we’re all in a cafe, trading Yeats poems and stuff. WALKER: Oh, no, there’s no folk scene here. STEREOGUM: Is there much of a folk scene in Chicago along the lines of what you do, or are you kind of working in a vacuum there? I was seventeen, on the regular playing fingerstyle guitar. WALKER: I always kinda dabbled, but I think I got into it … well, it was the same time as the noise stuff, too. STEREOGUM: How old were you when you started to do the more folk-oriented stuff? That whole scene, they were the ones who were like, “Oh, you should do the song stuff more.” So I kinda came out of that, that’s how I got my start. That’s how I started touring pretty hard, doing noise-rock stuff in basements, drinking tallboys of beer, getting annihilated and playing 10-minute sets for five people across the States. I know a lot of those bands real well now and I loved them growing up. I think the heyday of all the post-rock stuff is kinda like … I don’t know, those guys are still around. I did a lot of noise-rock things here in Chicago, too, when I first started playing around here a lot. WALKER: Nah, I like seeing it a lot, but I’m definitely not like a head for that sort of music anymore. STEREOGUM: Do you still follow punk music? I think I started on shitty punk music that nobody liked and my parents hated, so that was why I liked it. I always liked Zeppelin, and that opened a lot of doors to a lot of different acoustic guitar music. I was always also playing acoustic guitar. I started on electric guitar, I played in shitty punk bands forever. I think I got into the acoustic guitar from Zeppelin and stuff. I didn’t grow up in some peaceful household where people just listen to sick records all the time. Was this the first kind of music you gravitated toward as a kid? STEREOGUM: So take me through your musical development a bit. WALKER: No, I took lessons for a long time, dabbled with music a bit for my short stint in college, but to say I’m classically trained would be a farce to the guitar. I just got a guitar from a family friend. STEREOGUM: Considering how much your reputation has to do with your guitar playing, I figure it makes sense to ask about when you started playing guitar. His live show is supposed to be revelatory, so you should probably check that out, too, if he rolls through your town this year. His tradition is more or less the kind that’s based on defying forms and seeing how far out-there the music can be pushed. I guess I always expect folk-oriented musicians to be really concerned with tradition or something, but Walker is one of those guys who just loves playing guitar and trying to find something new with it. ![]() He has the same kind of amble in conversation as he does in his music, but in kind of a hippie-ish twenty-something way. I recently spoke with Walker, when he was sitting on his porch in Chicago looking out at two feet of snow. It took me a few listens to find my way into it, to develop a route through the album’s various twists and turns, but once I did, Primrose Green quickly became one of my favorite releases of early 2015. Working closely with a band partially composed of Chicago jazz musicians, Walker wound up with this sprawling, expansive record prone to wandering into mesmerizing passages dominated by psychedelic and jazz overtones. All Kinds Of You was gorgeous and accomplished, but Walker’s new one is a leap forward. I can’t say I follow a lot of contemporary artists who are looking back to that particular tradition, so when I received Primrose Green, I was pretty floored. Despite being raised in the industrial Northern Illinois town of Rockford and cutting his teeth in Chicago’s noise-rock scene, the other constant with Walker is that people always want to compare him to ’60s and ’70s folk musicians like Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, John Martyn, and Tim Buckley. ![]() Walker’s been getting his fair share of positive attention, often focusing on his guitar playing and the unique and unpredictable forms his vocal melodies and song structures take. Even though his full-length debut, All Kinds Of You, came out less than a year ago, 25-year-old Ryley Walker is already returning with sophomore release Primrose Green next month.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |