Music very regularly throws up mavericks. Not that many singer-songwriters are quite as contradictory, however, as 27-year-old Ryley Walker, who is just about to release his accomplished third solo album, Golden Sings That Have Been Sung.
Increasingly feted as the jazz-math-folk troubadour of the moment (yes, there are other exemplars giving Walker a run for his money in the cosmic Americana niche stakes), Walker combines shiver-inducing musical intensity with the goofiness of the class stoner-clown. When he puts his seemingly boneless, fluid fingers to his 12-string acoustic and shuts his eyes tight – as he does at the start of the multi-bar raga that prefaces the new song Funny Thing She Said – he is a picture of transported musicianship.
Through those fingers flow many woody and august antecedents: difficult homegrown masters like John Martyn or Bert Jansch, wayward American travellers like John Fahey, more canonical voices like Tim Buckley; the jazzy post-rockers of his adopted Chicago. Later in the set he’ll cover Tim Hardin’s If I Were a Carpenter.
He ebbs, he flows, he sweats, he shakes his hair; he looks like he has not had a day of sunshine in years, or any nutrients other than chips. He strums emphatically, he yips, goes off into another arpeggio, and ends abruptly with a final, violent prang of the guitar. The song, one of the best on the new album, has been an uneasy meander around a romance, markedly more rugged and questing than the recorded version.
Then the spell is broken, and Walker grins wickedly. “Start ’em off nice and sad!” he quips. “Working out my daddy issues on the stage, right now!” Later, he will mime the gurning, bear-like stagger of a drunken British teenager he once asked for directions. Even later, he will joke: “I’m sweating like a stepdad at a sporting event,” before spooling out the night’s climactic workout, Summer Dress. At Caught By the River three days previously, where he played with a full band, he described himself as being “like a narc at a Phish show”, after asking the audience how they were doing just a little too brightly. When he plays a winding, eastern-facing instrumental he recorded (but didn’t release) with fellow guitarist Bill MacKay (the two put out an album of collaborations, Land of Plenty, last year), Walker shouts “deep cuts!” with glee. A fan tonight buys him a beer in exchange for a free T-shirt.
Walker, then, is excellent company, not po-faced at all, despite his deeply serious musicianship. He performs to an intimate room of about 75 people on a Tuesday night with no band (too expensive to tour with: jazz-math-folk remains a shoestring affair). Played a certain way, though, a 12-string can compensate for bass and even drums. Add reverb and other effects, and the racket coming off the stage belies the over-polite tang of the jazz-folk tag Walker acquired with his last album, 2015’s feted Primrose Green. He has a wayward contralto, too, almost weedy on record. But live, he is louder and truer and almost shouting by the end, far more muscular and physical.
Listen in to Walker closely enough, and the contradictions actually run through his music. The title of Primrose Green, for instance, knowingly nods to the folk-rock revival that swept Britain in the 60s and early 70s, conjuring up that era’s bucolic, fol-de-rolling vibe. Walker manhandles various farm animals on the album artwork.
The song itself, though, is actually named after a drink the younger Walker and his friends invented, which is (according to the album sleeve) “two parts old granddad whiskey, one part water distilled with morning glory seeds”. Tonight the song’s music evokes faraway neo-medievalism (Robert Plant is a fan), mythical wisdom, and the like. Ultimately, though, it’s about getting messed up on hooch cut with psychedelics. He dedicates it to those friends, one of whom he doesn’t see any more, he says, another of whom died recently.
And so the night continues, yinning and yanging between Walker’s evocative, intensely felt music, his loves and losses, and his between-song wisecracking. His songs sound metaphysical but are littered with references to cigarettes, lottery tickets and being broke.
The Roundabout – another standout from his imminent album – is, by contrast, full-blooded and rich, pivoting on the emotion in one seemingly throwaway lyric. “Come to think of it, I think my dad wanted a daughter,” Walker sings; a line that might (or might not) loop round to those daddy issues alluded to earlier.
