He obliquely poeticizes around his subjects, speaking in riddles as esoteric as they are memorable. These are undoubtedly the album’s most straightforward lyrics.Įlsewhere, it’s clear that Walker has developed into a writer who turns the mundane into the profound. The refrain, “I am wise/I am so fried/Rang dizzy inside/Fuck me, I’m alive,” points to Walker’s amazement at reversing his downward spiral. “We’re all lot lizards parked outside your door,” Walker sings, later concluding, “Always shit-brained when I’m pissed.” Longtime fans may wonder, how did we get to this pomp? But “Rang Dizzy” floats things back to Earth with cello-augmented baroque ’n’ roll. The song soon downshifts into a dulcet burble of folk-rock with an earnest, Sebadoh-esque melodic contour that later splays out into surging proggy climaxes. On opening track “Striking Down Your Big Premiere,” though, you may gasp at the outrageously bold intro that leads into a motif of Keith Emersonian grandiosity, bolstered by rococo, fiery guitar riffing from Bill MacKay. He got happy, but, mercifully, not sappy. After a failed suicide attempt in 2019, Walker sought help through meds, therapy, sobriety, and he saved himself. As he admitted in an interview conducted in early April, he’d been sabotaging himself for years, saying that “redemption, joy, and gratitude” inform Course in Fable. Downtown Artery +Ġ6 – Milwaukee, Wis.Another factor in Walker’s artistic resurgence has been resolving his substance abuse problems. You can preorder the album here.Ģ7 – Boise, Idaho Idaho Botanical Gardens – Great Escape Seriesģ0 – Fort Collins, Colo. His tour dates can be found below, along with the tracklist and artwork for The Lillywhite Sessions. Walker will be touring for the remainder of the year. It’s a song that would feel right at home on Walker’s latest release, May’s Deafman Glance, which is a testament to the sincerity of Walker’s intentions with the project on the whole. It’s almost shocking how similar Walker’s vocal delivery is to Matthews’ at times, and the instrumental interplay is what Matthews’ band would sound like if they came up playing at underground jazz clubs instead of East Coast college campuses. The result is something more complicated, if less breezily feel-good than the original. Walker’s take on “Busted Stuff” finds him navigating the common ground between the goofy playground jazz of the original and his own jazz-tinged post-rock vamps. Most of the songs were eventually released on the album Busted Stuff, but the unmastered quality, as well as the forbidden-fruit aspect of The Lillywhite Sessions, made it a fan favorite for years. It was also one of the first albums to gain notoriety for being shared on Napster, back when the music industry was just catching on to that sort of thing. The original Lillywhite Sessions was a “lost album” of sorts, one that the band scrapped midway through recording. ![]() With that in mind, it was prescient of Walker to choose DMB’s “coolest” album to put his spin on. But he’s worn his influences on his sleeve-and on his social media accounts-since the start, and this project finds him reimagining what it means for a band to be “uncool.” The album is “for anyone who didn’t enter this world with fully formed musical tastes,” according to a press release. Since Walker is a post-rock-influenced, instrumentally intricate indie-folk songwriter, one would expect him to hide away those parts of his musical upbringing that the cool music kids might make fun of. Walker’s unabashed love of bands considered “uncool” by the indie-rock tastemakers has long been part of his mystique. ![]() Ryley Walker has released a cover of Dave Matthews Band’s “Busted Stuff” from his forthcoming re-imagining of DMB’s lost album The Lillywhite Sessions, out Nov.
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