Ryley Walker is a little demob happy. It is early in the evening at Green Man festival in August 2016, and standing behind the counter in the Rough Trade tent, he has just delivered the final performance of his European tour – a short acoustic set of songs taken from his last album, Primrose Green, and his third, Golden Sings That Have Been Sung, which culminates in a cover of Van Morrison’s Fair Play followed by the prompt downing of a pint and the announcement of his heartfelt intention to get exceedingly drunk before catching a flight home to Chicago.



Fans met, records signed, hands shaken, we ride a golf cart across the festival site – Walker calling out exuberantly to the pedestrians as we trundle by. At close quarters he is somewhat dishevelled – his skin ashen, his hair unruly, his eyes scrunched with weariness; he has the look of a man who has spent many days half-nourished, over-soaked and crumpled up on a tour that has carried him from Illinois to the Brecon Beacons via Leipzig, Luxembourg and Hebden Bridge. It’s only a short break – he’s back in Europe this month, with five UK shows next week.

Backstage, he offers me a swig of whisky, sprawls out on a bean bag and begins to tell me of his love for Tesco coleslaw. “Tesco is the best one,” he announces definitively. “In any city I seriously go to Tesco Express. I grew up deep white trash in northern Illinois, and I really appreciate working-class snacks. I grew up on shit food – Taco Bell, 7-11 food, you know, mayonnaise on bread, with cheese. So I identify with Tesco.”

Walker was raised in Rockford, a city of 150,000 people some 90 miles west of Chicago that was “economically depressed, once a big factory city, the victim of Reaganomics”. His mother worked in a grocery store, his father in a car factory, and life was fairly sweet, he says, until he turned 13. “And then you’re like, ‘This place sucks!’ As soon as you discover skateboarding, or as soon as you hear a Black Flag record and then you realise you’re not in a counter-cultural place. You realise you go to school, and you watch TV, and maybe you get to throw a brick through a window sometimes.” Did he do that? A smile snakes around Walker’s lips. “Yes, all the time,” he says. “I was a felon when I was a child. Petty crime and skateboarding were the only things I had to do.”

His parents were not particularly musical. “They ‘like’ music,” he says. “They like music the same way they like paying bills or paying their mortgage, as in: this is just something people do. I had to discover everything on my own.” He would badger his “cooler, older” sister to take him to thrift stores where he would rifle through the records. He remembers most particularly the day he chanced upon a copy of Pink Floyd’s 1971 album Meddle. “And I asked my friends and my parents have you heard this Pink Floyd record? And everyone said, ‘No, I haven’t heard that one.’ So I was like I’ve found a Pink Floyd record nobody’s heard?! I thought, ‘I’m into this, I want to find more shit that freaks my parents out.’”

For some while, this was Walker’s world: “Finding things that my peers and my parents didn’t know about, collecting deep shit.” And if Primrose Green, with its shades of Nick Drake, Tim Buckley and John Martyn, speaks to a particular circle, it is to those music fans who, like him grew up “fascinated by ephemera” – the boy who sought out Alice Coltrane and Led Zeppelin records, who hung out in the library trying to find books that mentioned Roy Harper, who first bought an Anne Briggs record from a friend’s father selling his collection to fund his divorce and promptly declared her “the one. I think she’s God … the absolute guts and emotion in her guitar”.

Yet this summer, the release of Golden Sings … proved surprising to many. Gone were the easy musical references, the pastoral settings and retro touchstones. “Primrose Green was my own self-conscious thing of ‘I want to be like a dude from the 60s!’” he says. “But I’m not really into record-collector dork scenes any more. I kind of think of it as this male-dominated, hierarchical scene. Like, ‘You haven’t heard this Wire record?’ It’s total macho bullshit. It’s not everyone, but that’s the domination, and it turns me off. I don’t want to be in your record collector club.”

He screws up his face and goes further: “To be honest. I don’t think I really like Nick Drake. I don’t think it really works any more. He’s a fucking genius, obviously, he was a great guitarist, great lyricist, but I don’t think it speaks to me any more. It’s the same thing when I listen to Fugazi – when I was a kid I thought this has to be the best band of all time. Now it doesn’t speak to me.”

Instead, on Golden Sings … Walker himself seemed to rise up – a stumbling, shambolic figure prone to braggadocio, vainglorious sentiments and jokes made at his own expense. Musically, its influences are worn more lightly than its predecessor – with nods to his Chicagoan forebears such as Tortoise, Mark Eitzel or Mark Kozelek, the sound augmented by arranger, producer and sometime Wilco member LeRoy Bach.

“What I wanted this time was personality in the music,” Walker says. “I was tired of mountains. Who gives a shit about that mountain?” he waves his hand vaguely in the direction of the hills overlooking the festival. “I can’t describe it any better than any poet of the last 1,000 years has described it.”

For all its exuberance, Golden Sings stems from a difficult and revelatory time in Walker’s life: emerging from a “horrible” break-up that had forced him to take a long, hard look at himself, he found a rising sense of anxiety. “The break-up encouraged that anxiety,” he says. “And then I had anxiety on tour, being away from people who I love. I think the whole record is a soundtrack of anxiety to touring. It’s called the road scaries, everybody has it – you’ll be in a van for eight hours a day, horrified of what you’re leaving back home. And I’m on tour all the time, just gone constantly. So I write songs about home.”

But it is not, he insists, an exercise in wallowing. “As sad as some of these songs might seem, they’re all really funny,” he says – after all the lead single is titled The Halfwit in Me, while other tracks allude to his “wise-ass wisdom”.

“That’s the Midwest thing,” Walker explains. “Self-deprecating humour; the first person you have to make fun of is yourself.” He pauses, rubs those weary eyes red. “I never want to hurt anybody ever again,” he says. “I think I’ve brought all this pain to people in my life. I don’t want to be a selfish asshole any more. I just want to put good back into the world.”

More than anything, then, he wanted this record to be about fun. “What I enjoy,” he says, leaning back on his bean bag, “is going to parties and being a fuck-up. That’s so fun. Or when you meet a bunch of cool people and stay up til five in the morning, or you’re with your friends and you throw a bottle against a wall …” Walker smiles, and a light lifts his drowsy face; a glimpse of the teenage felon not long left behind.

• At The Haunt, Brighton, 13 November. At Ruby Lounge, Manchester, 14 November. Box office: 0161-832 1111. At Broadcast, Glasgow, 15 November. Box office: 0141-332 7304. At Hare & Hounds, Birmingham, 16 November. Box office: 0121-444 2081. At Islington Assembly Hall, London, 17 November. Box office: 020-7527 8900.