It was him and an employee at his label, seeing each other at the holiday parties. The prospect of covering a DMB album began, as many things with Walker, as an off-handed joke. The Lillywhite Sessions never saw official release, and yet it lives on, with some fans calling it the best thing DMB ever did. Then Matthews re-recorded many of its songs for the 2002 album Busted Stuff. The Lillywhite Sessions leaked, prompting everyone to proclaim it a far more superior work to Everyday. Dave devotees mostly rejected that release, and the whole era became more convoluted from there. The recordings were deemed unsatisfactory, and Matthews wound up churning out 2001’s Everyday in just over a week instead. Intending to cut the successor to 1998’s Before These Crowded Streets, DMB entered the studio with Steve Lillywhite. Their fans adore them with a fervor reserved for generation-defining artists, while everyone else seems to be made physically ill by the mere mention of them.įor the former group, The Lillywhite Sessions is sacred territory. Dave Matthews Band might have more good songs than you remember, but they are still harshly divisive. The follow-up to Deafman Glance, as it turns out, is a full-album tribute to Dave Matthews Bands’ lost, unfinished album The Lillywhite Sessions.Įven with the people coming around to Matthews in recent times - most obviously with all the thinkpieces that accompanied the use of “Crash Into Me” in Lady Bird - the move of covering a whole DMB album is a bold one. And one of them is his long-standing defense of Dave Matthews Band. From praising Switchfoot’s guitar parts to saying Phil Collins-era Genesis is better than just about anyone, Walker’s got a whole collection of contrarian, yet earnest, takes. Within that, he’s also enthusiastically co-signed a whole lot of artists still awaiting their reappraisal, or artists who may never get one. Whether onstage or on Twitter, he’s prone to sarcastic quips and outlandish jokes, betraying a far more irreverent sense of humor than might’ve been readily evident in his earlier days. Throughout his career, there has been a divide between Walker’s music and his public persona. But he’s already back with another new collection, and it isn’t what any of us might’ve expected. A dark, difficult album - as a listening experience, and for Walker to make - one might’ve assumed it would take the prolific Walker a little while to release more music this time around. Ranking as one of our favorite albums of the year so far, Deafman Glance is also arguably Walker’s finest work. It marked the most significant transformation in an already shape-shifting career, finding Walker miles away from the folk troubadour we once knew as he delved into a battle-scarred sound indebted to Chicago post-rock and perhaps truer to himself than any of his past work. Back in May, Ryley Walker released his fourth album Deafman Glance.
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