“Once I got there, I thought I was an alien and couldn’t relate to anybody – mostly southern rednecks absolutely fried from their drugs of choice.” Within 24 hours, the label Secretly Canadian and Grammy-affiliated non-profit MusiCares had put Walker on a flight to a rehab centre in Nashville. Still using drugs, Walker returned to his home in New York and contacted his record label for help. “When you try to kill yourself and it doesn’t work, that obviously is a turning point.” I somehow woke up – thank God, Buddha, whatever is out there.” A pause. “I took a concoction that was sure enough to put me on my ass and kill me,” he says carefully, “but I woke up. I thought: I’ve set rules for myself and I’ve broken them all this is only getting worse.” He booked into a desert motel and attempted suicide. “I couldn’t think my way out of this on my own.
I sucked live, I looked like shit, I was waking up in cold sweats. Walker began talking to himself and fighting suicidal thoughts. Dopesick every day, having trouble finding drugs to keep me from getting sick.” “I was following his bus in this dinky rental car, being driven eight or nine hours every night alone. “There was this big stew of shitty weather all over the mountain states, Colorado, Idaho, and I didn’t know anybody,” he says. Supporting folk godfather Richard Thompson on a tour of North America in 2019, Walker began to feel his life had become unmanageable. “I’m resourceful for the very worst shit.” That’s the kind of addict I am,” he says. “Drop me in Butthole, America, and I’ll find the guy with pills. “It was clear from the start that I was obsessed with this shit, and I didn’t care about anything else.” By 2018, he was addicted to heroin, cocaine and alcohol. “Getting just two days sober was impossible since I was a kid,” he says calmly. When I speak to him, he is days away from marking two years sober.
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“But even the dorky stuff that’s about finding a mythical beast, I see it as the most free music.” If that sense of freedom is important on Walker’s new album, that’s because it comes from hard-won personal revelation. “Punk and indie obviously disarmed prog pretty heavily in the 70s and 80s. An ardent Genesis fan, Walker is one of many younger artists currently bringing prog rock in from the cold. I’m happy it came out but there’s no way I could do that now – I’m getting too fat for the cool pants.”Įxtricated from that sound, his creativity flourished through a string of studio albums, collaborations and live records – trading pastoral classicism for urban experimentalism and diving into the intersections between noise, free jazz, folk and psychedelia. “I’m a pretty self-aware and poor salesman, so I immediately shit on it.
“That unfiltered hate I had towards it was maybe a bit childish,” he says. Walker quickly soured on its success – the Chicago city kid miscast as a Nick Drake-style rustic troubadour – and in interviews called it “a terrible record”. In 2015, Walker’s second album, Primrose Green, became an unexpected critical hit for its faithful, if overly nostalgic, rendering of that era. That was until Walker’s interest in fingerpicking led him to the UK folk rock canon of the 70s – the era when artists such as Bert Jansch and Fairport Convention made visionary, stirring records from the raw material of traditional English song – and he began writing and recording in that style.
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