I just wanted to focus on songs rather than be a guitar player. I feel like kind of a fraud in the guitar business, theres so many great guitar players out there today. Since I recorded Primrose Green I’ve changed so much as a songwriter and as a guitar player. The songs do flow together nicely, for sure, but there are definitely no 15-minute sprawlers. It still kind of works as a suite, though. I wanted my label to be like, ‘What? What in the hell are we going to do with this?’ I thought that’d be interesting, to not have a single, and not have anything that could be played on the radio, something like a Coltrane record or Stormcock, but I just kept writing these kind of baroque songs. I think I just wanted it to be weird at first. More ideas kept coming to me, and I needed more songs on the record. I had this song “Sullen Mind”, one of the first ones I wrote, and I originally wanted it to be one side of the record. Everyone else in the band said ‘that sounds stupid’, so they kinda talked me out of it. It was important I did something different, so at first it was like, ‘Oh, I’ll do a four song suite’. How soon did the ideas that became Golden Sings start formulating in your head? Pretty soon after the album came out last year you were talking to Uncut about how you’d moved on and weren’t interested in those songs any more. I figured we should talk about what happened after Primrose Green, and how you got fairly quickly from Primrose Green to Golden Sings That Have Been Sung. “It’s mango and banana, man, a little yogurt, a little ice. It begins with Ryley at breakfast, having just made a smoothie. RYLEY WALKER SO CERTAIN FULLA longish extract of that interview will appear in the mag, but Ryley is a generous and entertaining talker, and so I thought the full transcript – in which he discusses Chicago, Eitzel, Kozelek, his wild years, God, the touring life, being a “dumbass”, being a “giant dick”, being a guitar “fraud”, being a “total idiot”, being immensely self-deprecating and so on – would be worth parking here. To go with that review, I called him up in Chicago a couple of weeks for a chat. In the next issue of Uncut, I’ve written a big review of Ryley Walker’s terrific third album, Golden Sings That Have Been Sung.
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