
It’s not a la carte like it is in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. I need to hear the neighbors yelling really fucking loud at each other in the middle of the night. I need to be able to buy a taco at two in the morning. I need to hear people outside of my window trying to buy crack. I appreciate nature, I appreciate driving through nature, but you put me in a campsite for more than two days and I’ll flip the fuck out. So I’ve fallen in love with Chicago pretty hard over the past year, despite crippling depression. The amount of imperfection in this city is really perfect. But that’s what I’m used to, that’s what I like. And everything here looks like it’s about to break. And in the summer when it really heats up it’s extra garbage-canny. It looks gray, there’s not a lot of color, and I find a lot of radiance in that. There’s so many weird twists about it: the way that street lights look here is really peculiar, and a really bleak sense when you walk around. More than ever I’m just finding little details about it that I love. That’s the sound of Chicago to me.Ĭhicago. This record is the sound of walking home late at night through Chicago in the middle of winter and being half-creeped out, scared someone’s going to punch you in the back of the head, and half in the most tranquil state you’ve been in all day, enjoying the quiet and this faint wind, and buses going by on all-night routes. And landlords knocking on doors to get rent that people don’t have. It’s the sound of strangers dodging one another. Everybody who talks to you on the street’s always got something they’re coming at you with. That’s the sound I hear, all the time, ringing in my ears. Chicago sounds like a train constantly coming towards you but never arriving. And I think I succeeded in that way - it’s got some weird instrumentation on there, and some surreal far-out words.Īnd it’s more Chicago-y sounding. I was always trying to make something like this I guess, trying to catch up with my imagination. I just wanted to make something weird and far-out that came from the heart finally. I didn’t want to be jammy acoustic guy anymore.

I wanted to make something deep-fried and more me-sounding. I was under a lot of stress because I was trying to make an anti-folk record and I was having trouble doing it. I went in expecting to make a fucking masterpiece, but I kept hitting a brick wall. I went in with over-confidence, I went in there like "Yeah, I’m ready to go!" but I was just kind of bullshitting. It took a year, and there were a lot of times I thought it was going nowhere, a lot of botched sessions. All tour dates are listed below.A statement from Walker regarding the album follows: The dates with Calexico include NYC stops at April 28 at Music Hall of Williamsburg ( tickets) and April 29 at Bowery Ballroom ( tickets). Ryley will be on tour this year, including a March residency at Chicago’s Cafe Mustache, Mexican Summer’s Marfa Myths festival, and a spring tour with Calexico. You can listen to the jazzy, flute-laden first single “Telluride Speed” below.

And I think I succeeded in that way - it’s got some weird instrumentation on there, and some surreal far-out words. There’s a looseness to some of the songs I guess, but I didn’t want to rely on just hanging out on one note. I think more than anything the thing to take away from this record is that I appreciate what improv and jamming and that outlook on music has done for me, but I wanted rigid structure for these songs.


While known as an adept improviser, Ryley took another approach for this record: Ryley Walker has announced his new album, which is titled Deafman Glance and will be out May 18 via Dead Oceans. I was really happy to see news about this come through this morning.
