![]() They scrapped it, but it spread like wildfire. A kid presented me with a blank Memorex CD-R and it was cool that this wasn’t supposed to come out. “There’s legends of records that never get out,” Walker says. Many of the tracks were later re-recorded for the DMB’s excellent 2002 LP Busted Stuff. After being scrapped by the label in favor of 2001’s more straightforward, mainstream-sounding Everyday, The Lillywhite Sessions were resuscitated by an Internet leak, its songs quickly becoming some of the band’s most beloved. “It was lacking everything the Dave Matthews Band was about.” So they put the songs on the shelf for another time. “The vibe wasn’t there,” Beauford told Rolling Stone in 2001. As Dave Matthews Band mythology goes, while working on the album, drummer Carter Beauford told an RCA Records executive that both he and the rest of the group weren’t feeling the songs, which were uncharacteristically dark. Like Radiohead’s Kid A and Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, two of the first major releases to be leaked and downloaded piecemeal by rabid fans via programs like Napster and LimeWire, The Lillywhite Sessions’ fate was also bound up with downloading. In a conversation with Rolling Stone, Walker returns often to a very particular moment in American music history: the massive cultural upheaval that came with the advent of file-sharing. But what he ended up with was closer to the source material than he’d expected. Like, what if we did a Sonic Youth kind of album, or like a noise band doing Dave Matthews,’” he says. “We were going to approach it in a different way, possibly. But on November 16th, he’ll unveil a very different project: The Lillywhite Sessions, a song-for-song cover of the Dave Matthews Band’s famously abandoned 1999–2000 studio material, recorded with veteran rock producer Steve Lillywhite. With Deafman Glance, released in May, Walker zeroed in on a groovy exploration of the intersection of folk, jazz and good old indie-rock guitar worship. His breakthrough was 2015’s Primrose Green, a kaleidoscopic record that expertly combined Van Morrison–flavored soul-folk with sprawling, Chicago-style noise and jazz. “When I listen to it, it takes me back to a place where things were very simple and I was very happy.”Īt 29, Walker has already released five albums and three EPs. “All I want to do right now is go back to the music I heard when I was fucking 15,” he says. “There, I said it.” It’s been a long journey to get to this point, but after years of disavowing his passion for bands like Coldplay, Switchfoot and DC Talk in order to pursue an identity as know-it-all indie rocker, the singer-songwriter has finally reconciled who he is today with the music he cherished growing up. “I love Coldplay!” Ryley Walker yells in the middle of a crowded bar in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood.
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