MacKay's guitar was recorded on the left channel and Walker's guitar was recorded on the right channel. The songs on the album were taken from the last two shows of the residency, on January 25 and 30.
It was recorded live during a January 2015 residency at The Whistler nightclub in Chicago. Īlso in 2015, Walker released an instrumental album, recorded in collaboration with fellow Chicago musician Bill MacKay, entitled Land of Plenty. Backing musicians Walker employed on Primrose Green include several noted Chicago jazz and experimental musicians such as Fred Lonberg-Holm. In 2014, he released his debut album for the Tompkins Square label, and followed it early in 2015 with Primrose Green released on Dead Oceans. Walker began his career in Chicago's independent music scene after moving there in the early 2010s, releasing several cassette EPs and a vinyl EP. Like Heather Leigh said to me earlier this year, I love lifers and there’s not much better than hearing one’s reincarnation.Walker, and critics, have cited the band Genesis and singer-songwriter Nick Drake as early influences. The evolution is incredible, though the price has been steep. It utterly floors me to hear such a timeless, instant classic record like this when I think back to those early Plustapes releases (good as they were, this is in another stratosphere). It’s a little bit of everything shoved into the blender that is Ryley Walker’s brain. “Clad With Bunk” flips from lush psychedelic pop orchestrations to chooglin grooves at the drop of a dime midway through while “A Lenticular Slap” sounds like something Tortoise would have made in 1973 in an alternate timeline. On the one hand this is 100% a 2020/21 record, but close my eyes and forget what it actually is and where we are, and you could make a convincingly argue it fits somewhere into any of the past seven decades.Ĭourse In Fable is a wild trip. But Walker and his cast of characters from Andrew Scott Young to Bill MacKay, all under John McEntire’s watch as producer, throw out inhibitions and let things get fucken weird. It’s got everything, and in someone else’s hands would probably end up being too damn much.
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Dizzying prog-drenched song structures (this is where everyone mentions Walker’s love for Genesis) holding hands with post rock parables butt up against languid folk noodles and free jazz-inspired squeal. With all that said, Course In Fable is a musical labyrinth.
It was like re-meeting myself all over again.” Circumstances and experiences are never the same for anyone, but this line from that interview gets at something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past year: “There’s a lot of happiness in the music now, there’s more personality. I don’t talk about the mental health shitshow I found myself in 7-ish years ago, but it was gnarly and took a lot of years and a lot of therapy to get to the place I am now. I don’t know him at all, but reading that Guardian interview resonated hard. Where Course In Fable strikes deepest is in the lamentations and realizations around the journey and in the celebration that you don’t need to swim in the darkness to thrive.ĭuring the press circuit for this record, Walker’s vulnerability is a bullhorn. I tried to pretend for a while that I wasn’t, but when whatever it is flows through your veins, you can only keep it at bay for so long. Somewhere inside the inimitable Ryler Walker’s latest, everything clicks and Course In Fable becomes not just a celebration of so much that I love about music and how it can make people feel, but a monument to the path it takes to get here.
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