But a few other people in that scene, too. Yeah, three of them, at least: Frank, Ben, and Brian. That definitely leant a hand to the direction the music was going. They’re all Chicago jazz musicians, heavily based in improv. While you were making the record, you played a lot around Chicago, right?ĭid the city itself help you to put the pieces together? I played that record before it came out, by the time it came out, I was like, “Goddamn it, I gotta make new stuff.” ![]() ![]() I always play new stuff, so early last year when I was touring Primrose Green I was playing songs from this new record, so they could be good when I go to the studio-all fresh and shit. Yeah, I mean, we recorded them in early 2014, and by the time the record came out, it was a year. If I understand correctly, you grew pretty tired of the Primrose Green songs pretty quickly. On the other hand, though, when Walker’s home, as he tells me, you can find him at the hot soup bar at Mariano’s grocery store near his place, and to hear him tell it, the stresses of a life on pilgrimage are worth the rewards. It’s the sonic translation of the brutal Chicago winter and the unhideable interior darkness that it seems to either engender or expose. The overcast skies that seem to hang over the record, and the way Walker holds up a single lyric and examines all of its possibilities-the title phrase in “Funny Thing She Said” in particular-recall Songs: Ohia’s Didn’t It Rain, itself inextricably linked to Chicago’s industrial landscape. It’s an album that was written on the road, a chronicle of life as a mildly popular player in a niche genre, and it’s both bemused by the modesty of its author’s success (he doesn’t have to pay for drinks at the bar!) and scared of what a life without music might hold. While Walker is quick to undersell his own skills in the face of his collaborators (he’s the only person I’ve heard use the word “dunce” in a musical context, and he does so twice in the half hour we’re on the phone), his temperament is the rudder that guides Golden Sings. Still, it’s not as loose of a record as those names might suggest. ![]() Walker’s long been a fixture in the local experimental scene-math-crunchers Health&Beauty and free-jazz cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm both played on Primrose Green -and Golden Sings borrows heavily from the city’s rich tradition of elegantly constructed and joyfully played avant-rock à la Tortoise, The Sea and Cake, Gastr del Sol. If Primrose was a stoned day traipsing through an English garden, Golden Sings is an early-dark evening spent trudging around Chicago’s industrial west side, another working-class Chicago record in a long and proud tradition of working-class Chicago records. ![]() He’s being a bit unfair- Primrose Green remains a compelling piece of softly psychedelic folk that benefits from his apparent pretensions-but that unfairness stems in part from how proud he is of his new album, Golden Sings That Have Been Sung, which was produced by Leroy Bach, formerly of Wilco. “I think it pandered to record collectors and my own fucking ego of what I wanted to be-a far-out sixties guy, or a private press record,” Walker says on the phone from Leamington Spa, England, where’s he’s currently on tour. The guitarist made his bones with the release of his second album, Primrose Green, last March, spinning a handful of lengthy folk songs out of knotty acoustic-guitar playing and pastoral imagery that is in retrospect almost comically out of place in the Chicago music scene from which it sprung. Ryley Walker no longer cares about forests and summer dresses, muddy old rivers and baptism scenes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |