Ryley Walker’s song “Primrose Green” stops you in your tracks when you hear it on the radio. And it’s been played on the radio a lot, both on Americana and AltRock/college stations, since Walker’s album of the same name was released earlier this year.
With its loping, melancholy yet sunny melody and loose but insistent Folk/Jazz arrangement, it doesn’t sound much like anything else being played on those formats. Walker’s fingerstyle acoustic guitar work is dreamily introspective, with room for furious improvisation, and his voice soars and recedes with an atmospheric, note-holding fluidity that has a forceful yet ghostly quality. He’s in the moment, and his band, especially keyboardist Ben Boye and electric guitarist Brian Sulpizio, knows how to push him onward.
The lyrics, too, are mysteriously sensuous. You initially think of Primrose Green as being some meeting place, the village square of a 19th-century New England town.
But when you hear him sing, “Lost my mind with a headful of primrose green,” you wonder if he’s actually in some altered state.
You’ll be able to get a closer look and listen when Walker appears at the MidPoint Music Festival in one of its prime slots Saturday at Woodward Theater. He will be with a band that features players who helped make Primrose Green so distinctive.
Walker’s most pronounced influences are from another time and place — the great Romantics of the late 1960s/early 1970s who merged Folk, Jazz and Rock into something new. On Primrose Green, he reinvents the kind of music once created by Tim Hardin, John Martyn, Nick Drake and Bert Jansch, and heard on albums like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and Tim Buckley’s Happy Sad.
Not bad for a young man from a working-class background in Rockford, Ill. Walker maintains some of that down-home modesty today, even as his acclaim builds.
“My dad makes tractor parts all day,” he says. “I just work on guitar all day. It’s the same thing. The only way to get out of the town was by working, so that was instilled in my head, to keep busy all the time. I was fortunate enough to have that upbringing.”
Walker’s first full-length release was on the New York-based Tompkins Square label, last year’s All Kinds of You. He then switched to Bloomington, Ind.’s Dead Ocean records — home to such adventurous artists as Phosphorescent, Destroyer and Julianna Barwick — for this year’s Primrose Green.
Rockford is close enough to Walker’s current base of operations, Chicago, to be influenced by its cutting-edge musical scene. As a kid in seventh grade, Walker was playing electric guitar in a band, inspired initially by Chicago label Touch and Go, which had acts like Big Black and The Jesus Lizard.
“I was in a lot of Rock, Punk and Hardcore bands, a lot of Noise Rock stuff,” Walker says. “Obviously that had Chicago roots, with the Touch and Go stuff we always tried to emulate. That was definitely the root of it all. None of the bands (I was in) were good, but that’s where we started. When you’re a kid, you just play because that’s how you fuck around after school.”
As a teen, Walker discovered other musicians by searching through record stores. One who had a deep impact was John Fahey, an outsider-ish fingerstyle acoustic guitarist influenced by, but not imitative of, older Folk and Blues players. Unconventional in his lifestyle as well as his musical approach, Fahey has become one of America’s great cult musical figures since his death.
“When you hear John Fahey, it’s like, ‘Holy shit,’ ” Walker says. “This is underground music for true record-heads, not mainstream Pop at all. It’s the real deal. That led me to a lot more underground, far-out sounds.”
Walker has also emulated Fahey’s passion for being a musicologist and reissuing “lost albums” by others. Just recently, Tompkins Square reissued an instrumental album Walker had discovered, 1972’s Opus III by the late Chicago guitarist John Hulburt.
“I found his solo record in a record store in the suburbs of Chicago,” Walker says. “It was great and nobody ever did anything with it. So I got in touch with his family and we just worked it out.”
Walker’s exposure to Fahey’s music brought him to other visionary musicians of the past, like Drake and Buckley.
“I just found them through record collecting and trading with friends,” he says. “I do love their vocal styles — it’s a voice not male or female, and it’s passionate too.”
Similar to those artists, Walker allows a certain looseness to seep into his melodies, vocals and lyrics.
“Voices are kind of rambling off the top of my head; the music is the same way,” he says. “Everything is on the fly, very introspective and narrative.”
That doesn’t mean, however, his songs aren’t about anything specific. Primrose Green’s “On the Banks of the Old Kishwaukee” is based on memories of seeing Christians getting baptized in a Rockford river.
“I always found it kind of funny and sweet that people could find salvation in a polluted river,” Walker says.
And, yes, the song “Primrose Green” is about substance abuse. It’s inspired by a night getting wasted on whiskey and psychedelic morning glory seeds, which left him struggling to recover the next day. Walker says he probably wouldn’t try to recreate the experience again, even though it did lead to a great song.
“I only write what I know,” he says.
RYLEY WALKER plays Saturday at Woodward Theater as part of the 2015 MidPoint Music Festival.
This article appears in Sep 23-29, 2015.
