By K.D. Norris
To say Chicago-based Ryley Walker is a busy man these days would be a grand understatement. Just check his passport and his album/EP catalogue and music downloads.
After gigs in Europe on Nov. 30 through Dec. 2 — in the Brighton UK, Paris and Amsterdam, respectively — Walker will likely catch a red-eye and get over a bout of jet lag before he takes the stage at Calvin College on Wednesday, Dec. 5.
And that is just his live music schedule. He has also been busy in the studio.
So far this year the 29-year-old singer-songwriter and guitarist from Rockford, Ill., has released Deafman Glance, an eclectic mix of originals, as well as the just-out The Lillywhite Sessions, a track-by-track cover of Dave Matthews’ infamously abandoned 2001 art-rock masterpiece of the same name.
So, the audience at Calvin’s Recital Hall should be prepared for a wild ride with Mr. Walker. And cheap tickets — $10 general admission — are still available.
Deafman Glance is Walker’s fifth album release since 2014, not to mention three EP releases between 2011-13, including The Evidence of Things Unseen, originally only available on cassette. (Ya, he’s worked his way up.) His 2015 album release, Primrose Green, gained a ton of buzz and included several notable Chicago jazz and experimental musicians doing their instrumental things.
While Walker is probably proud of Deafman Glance, he quickly moved on to the next thing on his non-stop musical ride.
“It’s a good record. But I can’t really listen to it anymore. It kind of broke my brain,” Walker said in supplied material. “I was under a lot of stress because I was trying to make an anti-folk record and I was having trouble doing it. I wanted to make something deep-fried and more me-sounding. I didn’t want to be jammy acoustic guy anymore. I just wanted to make something weird and far-out that came from the heart finally.”
An initial listen of Deafman left me with the feel that I was on a long road-trip with the musician, with the smooth, confident alt-pop songwriting flowing forth often in almost stream of consciousness, accompanied by long long instrumental/synth experimentations. My favorite cuts were “Opposite Middle”, “Spoil With the Rest” and, for an unknown reason, the hypnotic instrumental “Rocks on Rainbow”. But there are several soft, almost spacey ballads.
From Deafman, Walker turned to The Lillywhite Sessions, and a sometimes complete reinterpretation of Matthews songs, which Walker describes as “a record where (Matthews) and his band indulged a new adult pathos and a budding musical wanderlust … (with Walker’s covers being) one adolescent fan’s fulfillment of that possibility, a partial musical map of the places that this trio’s early interest in Matthews has since taken them.”
An initial listen to Lillywhite found interpretations filled with both smooth and jagged synth riffs, sparse almost jazzy horn riffs, and often haunting alt-pop sounds. Having little experience with Matthews’ originals, I found “Big Red Fish” to be my favorite, while “Grace is Gone” was the one original remembered, but I was still drawn to Walker’s clear, clean version.
The period of the making of Deafman and Lillywhite was, not so incidentally, actually filled with the “a new adult pathos” of Walker’s own.
“I quit drugs and booze recently,” he says. “I got sick of being a party animal — I don’t want to be 19-gin-and-tonics-Ryley any more. My brain is working a little better now, but man I was just going at it pretty wildly, and then trying to make a record (Deafman Glance) while I was drinking, it was kind of like torture.
“The songs (on Deafman) don’t really deal with any political or personal or social issues at all. Mostly it just comes from being bummed out. And there’s not a lot of musical influences on the record. I wasn’t even listening to music when I made it. … Maybe I’d say it’s a record for coming up or coming down. It’s not an album for the middle of the day. It’s for the beginning or end of it.”
Can’t think of a better way to end a work day than catching Walker at Calvin.
The concert will be somewhere in Calvin’s Covenant Fine Arts Center, 1795 Knollcrest Circle SE, Grand Rapids. For tickets and information, visit calvin.edu/calendar/event . For more on Ryley Walker visit ryleywalker.com.
