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At a pretty young age it kind of became all I cared about. "I had a big habit of going to rummage shops and seeking out Led Zeppelin records, which was a big thing for me. There’s not too much going on there really. There were a lot of weird old factories downtown and a lot of angry people.
Ryley walker primrose green lyrics full#
It’s your classic Midwest town with lots of busted-up old factories and ‘Reaganomics’ in full effect. You were born and raised in Rockford, Illinois. (Image credit: Dusdin Condren) Raised in Rockford His kind is all too rare, so we took the chance to separate the man from the fast-forming myth. A man who lost half his hearing in an accident but found joy in acoustic music afterwards, Ryley Walker joins a long lineage of folk vagabonds. Still just 25, he’s utterly focused on music and little else. Prodigious talent positively wafts from it. His mercurial fretboard wizardry is complemented in no small part by the incredible ensemble of Chicagoan jazz improvisers in his band - and the majority of the album was made up on the spot and recorded in first takes. Ryley’s playing calls to mind the likes of hallowed UK folk heroes like Bert Jansch and Davey Graham, while his writing has much in common with the heady jazz/ blues-based jams of Van Morrison and Tim Buckley - all names we do not drop lightly.
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The sprawling pastoral folk evidenced on second album Primrose Green has undeniable roots in 60s and 70s songwriters, but it ranges far wide of nostalgic reverence. "Ryley’s playing calls to mind the likes of hallowed UK folk heroes like Bert Jansch and Davey Graham"Ĭhicago’s Ryley Walker is the kind of figure whom it’s tempting to describe as ’not of his time’, but perhaps in this age of genre blur the very opposite is true. Oh yeah, and he made up his excellent second album, Primrose Green on the spot. He’s the 25-year-old fingerstyler who’s a freewheeling inheritor of the spirit of Jansch and Graham. (Image credit: Dusdin Condren) Introduction
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