“For me, it was an incredible opportunity,” recalls Ryley, “…because you would sometimes also have Dan Bitney, the drummer with Tortoise, and I’d get to play with these people. Back in 2009, still in his teens, he had frequented the improv nights hosted by Bach at a restaurant/gallery space called Whistler. Ryley had been a long-time admirer of sometime Wilco multi-instrumentalist LeRoy Bach. With only one person on his shortlist, once again, all roads led back to Chicago. “Jeff Parker was the guitarist with Tortoise, and I used to listen to him a lot,” recalls Ryley, who figured that, for the first time in his career, it might be helpful to enlist the services of a producer. Some of his formative musical memories had been shaped by the work of pioneering Chicago acts such as Gastr del Sol and Tortoise. If “The Roundabout” represented a symbolic return to Chicago, other songs were directly wedded to Ryley’s actual return there. I was thinking about a bar just outside of Appleton, Wisconsin, called The Roundabout, that I’d sometimes go to with my parents.” What is ostensibly a song about “any of those bars in the mid-West where the beer is $2 for a giant glass of beer, and they’ve got chicken fingers and fries for $5” opens a portal into Ryley’s own blue-collar psychogeography, with inspired gambolling double bass from Anton Hatwich to help propel us there. All I had was ‘You could find me at the Roundabout’. “I didn’t really have any lyrics at that point.
In September, over 1500 people turned up to watch Ryley and his band at Amsterdam’s legendary Paradiso club. Over the ensuing months, Ryley’s increasing desire to push himself beyond the strictures of songs he had already recorded, increased his hunger for concocting new material before ever increasing audiences. And a Christian education isn’t likely to save you from that.”
Of “Sullen Mind”, the song which grew out of those improvisations, Ryley explains, “I felt like I wasn’t raised to have to deal with negative, dark things in my life, but the reality is that I do. Last May, before an audience of “about four people” in Cleveland Ohio, Ryley remembers springing a new riff upon long-time guitar foil Brian Sulpizio, over which he found himself singing the line, “I only have a Christian education.” Over a period of successive nights, this riff, attached to a single lyrical fragment, broadened out into what would become one of the signature songs on the next record – with Ryley as much a fascinated witness to its creation as those who saw it taking shape. Word of mouth and critical acclaim ensured sell-out audiences at his British shows, whilst a sprawling tour of the USA around 'Primrose Green' presented a perfect chance to workshop ideas for what would eventually become his third studio album, 'Golden Sings That Have Been Sung'. By the time of his 26th birthday last summer though, it became increasingly clear to Ryley that his recorded work was becoming less and less representative of the directions he and his close-knit group of musicians were taking in the live shows. Indeed, anyone who caught his performances throughout the course of 2015, will attest to Ryley’s apparently effortless facility to conjure a breath-taking spectacle from a standing start. After a year spent on the road, all that Ryley could associate with Chicago was the emotional debris he had left behind.
For all of that, a holiday was the last thing on Ryley’s mind – and certainly not a holiday in his adopted hometown. Robert Plant declared himself a fan – as did double-bass legend Danny Thompson, with whom Ryley would later embark on a British tour. In March, his second album 'Primrose Green', emerged to critical hosannas from the likes of NPR, Village Voice, Uncut, and Mojo – in the process, earning admiration of musicians who had chalked up no shortage of turntable miles in Walker’s life. The preceding months had been extraordinary. However you wished to measure it, he was surely due some sort of holiday. In November 2015, at the end of a ten month period which saw him play over 200 shows, Ryley Walker decided that he should probably head home.
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