His tradition is more or less the kind that’s based on defying forms and seeing how far out-there the music can be pushed.

I guess I always expect folk-oriented musicians to be really concerned with tradition or something, but Walker is one of those guys who just loves playing guitar and trying to find something new with it. He has the same kind of amble in conversation as he does in his music, but in kind of a hippie-ish twenty-something way. I recently spoke with Walker, when he was sitting on his porch in Chicago looking out at two feet of snow. It took me a few listens to find my way into it, to develop a route through the album’s various twists and turns, but once I did, Primrose Green quickly became one of my favorite releases of early 2015. Working closely with a band partially composed of Chicago jazz musicians, Walker wound up with this sprawling, expansive record prone to wandering into mesmerizing passages dominated by psychedelic and jazz overtones. All Kinds Of You was gorgeous and accomplished, but Walker’s new one is a leap forward. I can’t say I follow a lot of contemporary artists who are looking back to that particular tradition, so when I received Primrose Green, I was pretty floored. Despite being raised in the industrial Northern Illinois town of Rockford and cutting his teeth in Chicago’s noise-rock scene, the other constant with Walker is that people always want to compare him to ’60s and ’70s folk musicians like Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, John Martyn, and Tim Buckley.

Walker’s been getting his fair share of positive attention, often focusing on his guitar playing and the unique and unpredictable forms his vocal melodies and song structures take. Even though his full-length debut, All Kinds Of You, came out less than a year ago, 25-year-old Ryley Walker is already returning with sophomore release Primrose Green next month.

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