ryley Walker
On the eve of his new release, Deafman Glance, we catch up with Chicago guitar maestro Ryley Walker to chat Genesis, migrating to the city and the regret of selling a guitar
Combining the spirit of John Martyn with American free jazz
After writing albums with a solid acoustic framework, Ryley Walker decided to go into the studio relatively unarmed to create a less conventional, more electric-sounding record; Deafman Glance is the result, and it’s a set of songs that will surprise any listener expecting another Primrose Green (2015). The new album is his most challenging and possibly best effort yet.
“It did take us a long-ass time to make,” he smiles. “On previous records it was a one-two-three-four punk rock let’s-do-this-shit kind of approach, but that’s because I was really well prepared back then; I’d written the songs before going into the studio and I’d played them live a dozen times. This time it was simply, ‘Let’s go into the studio and make a record’ and it was a lot more audacious and time-consuming than I had planned and had budgeted for, so I lost my mind in the process, but we came out on the right end I think.” It is certainly a bold creation, with songs like
Accommodations bringing in discordant percussion and space sounds alongside archtop guitar, jazz flutes and Ryley’s signature laconic vocal. Perhaps this one will be known as Ryley’s Chicago album. “Yeah, before I was living out in the suburbs on Golden Sings That
Have Been Sung (2016) and now I’m on the south side having a hot dog, smoking a loose cigarette and drinking a 40oz Cobra beer,” he laughs. “I do enjoy this album more than the others at the moment, I guess. I have been wanting to make weird songs like the track
Accommodations for a long time, but I couldn’t really crack the code on how to write and record them, but this time it was something that was built completely in the studio. I remember the riff coming to me while I was sitting around on the couch waiting for somebody to record a drum track or something. I was playing some slow, brooding guitar chords and I just went, ‘Oh shit, new song, man!’ I wanted something super-weird and hard to digest, and that one lends itself more to an outward free jazz band, or something like that.”
Elsewhere on the album, like on Can’t Ask Why, there is very pretty electric guitar picking that swells into
“I have been wanting to make weird songs like Accommodations for a long time”
thrilling distorted freak-outs towards the end. “Oh yeah, that comes from listening to a lot of Genesis’ A Trick Of The Tail,” he laughs. “That record has lots of those low ambient moments and slow, stewing pieces; listening to that is like having a beef stew slowly cooking up, and then all of a sudden it’s like, bam! A song kicks in. I really like those twists and turns, it’s like snakes and ladders music and I’m really happy to have things like that on there. I’m proud of all of my records, but this is a very personal one and I like the words a lot, but also the music, because it’s really strange and not a lot of people are doing it right now.”
It could well be the album that marks a turning point in this musician’s career thus far. “Yeah, the Golden Sings... record came during this transitional phase, I think,” he answers, after a moment. “I was still hugely influenced by the UK folk scene, so there were still elements of that on there, but a few of the songs on Golden Sings... hint at what’s next; I think The Halfwit In Me had elements of Chicago music, jazz music and pop music and what have you, and it felt like the next step. I’m not running away from any record I’ve made in the past, but this does feel like the beginning of the end of a lot of musical things in my life; I can’t really go back to making a Fairport Convention sounding record, you know? Right now, I’m interested in the weird and contemporary.” The lead single from Deafman Glance is
Telluride Speed, which, along with summing up Ryley’s current musical position, also demonstrates what the album is about, with long, free-flowing guitar and flute lines juxtaposed with refrains and solid songwriting. It’s a complex and multistaged thing in itself.
“Ah man, it’s the stupidest song, I have five or six CDs full of Telluride Speed on my desk at home,” he says with a laugh. “There are probably at least 20 different versions, not just takes, but versions, of that song now. It was way different when I first started writing it back at the beginning of 2017, when I was supporting Andrew Bird. Those opening gigs are fun to do, but you have to know your place, and that’s as the most replaceable part of the whole thing. You go there and are very professional and courteous and you earn two or three hundred bucks, but some guys get mad because they say the audience ignore them or some shit. But those are lucky gigs, because you get to test new material. The audience has less expectations, so you can do well and play well, but still experiment, and Telluride Speed started there. It was like some kind of Sonic Youth noise-rock
“This [record] does feel like the beginning of the end of a lot of musical things in my life”
song at the beginning – way more rock ’n’ roll, but we ended up with some weird softrock prog song – and, you know, I’m really happy with it.”
Along with the strange and the structure, there is a healthy dose of the improvised about the record, which has always been an important part of Ryley’s musical maturing. “I do a lot of improv music around Chicago, and a lot of what I do with Bill [Mackay] is improv too,” he nods. “We have songs, but when we play live we’re making half of it up. So with those gigs or the free jazz ones or whatever, whenever I do it, it always informs my songwriting. I figure out all of these new codes of keys in guitar playing and that’s what makes me a better guitar player. I love writing songs with words and stuff, but doing those kinds of gigs keeps me sharp and so does learning to play off of other people; listening to those creepy spaces between the music influences the songs I’m making now. I’ll come back from those shows with enough to write a folk song or an indie-rock song or whatever, with those sorts of ideas in mind. That whole world informs my songwriting, 100 percent.”
Tuning Way Up
What has also informed Ryley’s songwriting over the years has been his choice of guitar, and one that he has been joined at the hip with for many years has been his old Guild Dreadnought. “That was the guitar I used to do all of my acoustic stuff on this record, my D-35 from the late 70s,” he nods. “That one is my workhorse, but I have also recently acquired a Gibson ES-125, which I wrote almost all of this new record on. I think it’s a ’59 and it’s kind of unique in that it has two pickups instead of just one; they did a really limited run of about a thousand with two pickups and it sounds really fuckin’ bad-ass having the range from using both bridge and neck pickups. I’m usually always using different slack tunings, but on most of this album I was using this weird tuning, which I don’t know the name of, but basically you tune the sixth string up to G and the fifth string up to B, with the rest in standard, so the bottom two are up an octave. And I capo a lot too, going down to the fourth or fifth fret, which makes it really fun for fingerpicking, alternating between the Gs and Bs on there makes some really pretty stuff. I got into tuning up instead of down a lot
“I do a lot of improv... it always informs my songwriting”
around the time I was doing this record, which also separates it a bit from the rest I guess. I was re-tuning the sixth for a while and then started tuning up the fifth too. As a kid I was really blown by Robert Fripp’s New Standard tuning and what he would do with it, and now I’ve really been enjoying all of the bizarre chords you can get out of tuning way up, it’s really fun. “Another guitar I used on Deafman
Glance was this old Martin 12-string from the 70s. It was a D12-20 with a beautiful sunburst top, which was really rare, but I’ve just sold it and I’m really mad about it! That was a really cool guitar and I went and sold it, goddamnit! But, anyway, some other guitars I used on there were a 70s Les Paul Junior. I’d always avoided Les Pauls because they were too heavy for me, I had to kind of lean to the side, but this Junior has a light body and a really big sound, so I’ve really enjoyed playing that. I also wanted to get an archtop sound on a lot of the record, particularly Accommodations, so I used this absolutely beautiful Gibson from the 1930s. I don’t remember the exact model, but it is a stunning guitar. I’ve always been a fan of the way Derek Bailey played and I think I approached the archtop parts on this one with that in mind. He didn’t view the guitar as just the strings and the fretboard, but saw the whole thing as part of this booming instrument; he’d get behind the bridge and start plucking the strings around there, which I’ve always thought was pretty cool.”
Plug In And Go Vintage
When it comes to amplification, vintage Gibson comes to the fore again for Ryley. “I have this old Explorer amp from the 1950s, which is a small combo amp; it’s a tiny little fucker, but also the most rounded amp I’ve ever used in my life, I love that thing. I got it off of a friend some years back and I always use it on everything I do; for electric guitars loud and quiet and acoustic guitars, it just sounds beautiful. And, as I’ve also used an early 70s Reverberocket on the record, I’ve amp stacked a lot for the first time. But there wasn’t really very much in the way of guitar effects used by me on this one; the only thing I used live was overdrive, but any reverb or delay was added post-production from a tape.”
The tape point of the conversation is an important one for Ryley, as Deafman Glance was recorded using analogue processes, something he feels has an important effect on the product. “Yeah, the whole thing was recorded to tape,” he says, enthusiastically. “And it was mixed on tape too, so it’s 100 percent analogue and it’s a really coolsounding record. I’m not even the world’s biggest audiophile, by any stretch of the imagination, but just seeing the process with your own eyes – like seeing the tools being used to cut it and looking under the hood and seeing all of the working parts there putting your music out into the world makes it all quite special to me now, you know? I’m open to recording by any means, I don’t want to be tied to just digital or analogue, but having this album go out without having undergone any digital processes in its production is pretty amazing and makes the whole thing even better to me.”