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. READ MORE: The Big Listen: Ryley Walker – Course In Fable.Secondly, his brain is like a well-thumbed encyclopedia volume on the great guitarists of our time. Firstly, he speaks with a restless, accelerated enthusiasm that’s hugely engaging. Two things about Ryley Walker become apparent early in our 40-minute interview.
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