Soon, the fingerpicking maniac was befriending the bands he’d idolised and submerging himself in the Windy City’s underground avant-garde scene. From there, I was a fingerpicking maniac.” Freak folk was really big and they all come from punk-rock backgrounds, but were into Fairport Convention, a weird marriage of noise music and British prog, singing about finding a magical mushroom on a mountain surrounded by dragons. “Then I found Robbie Basho and John Fahey records and latched onto those really hard. “By the time I was in punk and rock bands in high school, I was a huge Sonic Youth fan, weird tuning gods,” he recalls. Growing up an hour away in Rockford, Illinois, as a teenager he travelled into the city, digging for records by Smog, Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Tortoise.
While Walker moved to New York in 2019, Course In Fable is wholly a Chicago record. His decisions as a player are incredible, one in a million.” The dynamic between us is really friendly, there’s a push and pull and I’d trust him with any music. That record they did, is how we first came together – let’s make a great acoustic duo record, but we always end up talking about Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix or Minutemen, that’s what Chicago music is to me, punk-rock influenced prog. We’re big fans of John Renbourn and Bert Jansch.
“Bill’s a straight-up musician, educated, from a musical background. There’s a hint of irony in the playing, it’s a nod to people who sell used solid-state amps for way too much money. “I like to call them ‘bald guy with ponytail’ guitar players, who have a beer belly and a Yes Fragile tour T-shirt. “I told Bill, ‘Make your solos sound like you’re a professor at Berklee in 1985, trying to prove something’,” says Walker. On Course In Fable, their fluent conversations dart and shimmy through complex arrangements, an air of rejuvenated joy in the intricate arrangements. Joining Walker on his journey into the progosphere is longstanding foil Bill MacKay, with whom he’s made a pair of albums of interlocking guitar exploration. Not one for standing still, Walker has also made two albums with jazz drummer Charles Rumback and a live record with Japanese psych-rockers Kikagaku Moyo. The evolution was advanced on 2018’s Deafman Glance, and Course In Fable completes the journey. By 2016’s Golden Songs That Have Been Sung, he was pointing towards more ambitious abstractions, less indebted to Martyn, Jansch and Tim Buckley. While he’s grateful for “the opportunities it brought me”, Walker says the troubadour stylings of 2014 debut All Kinds Of You and Primrose Green belong to a different era. I love prog that’s rooted in reality, not so much the dwarves and magical fairies.” Droney, feedbacky stuff, tapping, 12-string playing, fingerstyle, solos… Genesis is not prog with a capital P, they had a sense of humour. Steve Hackett was doing stuff nobody else did. “I wanted it to sound like if Peter Gabriel was on Thrill Jockey,” Walker explains, from his home in the hills of western Massachusetts. He’s calling it, with tongue only slightly in cheek, his prog album. It’s the furthest Walker has travelled from the Anglophile folk of 2015’s celebrated Primrose Green and, he says, “the most confident and put-together playing I’ve ever done on record”. Starting out at The Verve’s Nick McCabe, the first player to catch his ear as a child, Walker veers from Keith Richards, George Harrison and Jimmy Page to Robbie Basho, Bert Jansch and John Martyn, Steve Hackett, John Abercrombie and Derek Bailey, Sonny Sharrock, Jeff Parker and Bill Frisell, and on to Tom Morello and Thurston Moore.Ĭourse In Fable is a dazzling embodiment of a lifetime’s passion for guitars and guitarists, a near-virtuosic expression inspired by the fusion of genres in Chicago’s fertile 1990s scene, led by Tortoise and Gastr del Sol. We’re here to talk about Walker’s fifth solo album, Course In Fable, and along the way we cover a whole lot of ground.
Two things about Ryley Walker become apparent early in our 40-minute interview.