He might well be thinking about the same bar in “Age Old Tale,” whose final lines lay out a singsong affirmation followed closely by some defensive crowing: “And I’m beloved by the loved, who love to love,” he sings. “You can find me at the Roundabout,” he sings, making it as much a pledge as a tip. Walker sings the chorus as a chant:Īnd with a sullen mind, I carry you And with a sullen mind, I’m fair And with a sullen mind, I laid down And with a sullen mind, I’m out of hereīy contrast, “ The Roundabout” is about a neighborhood bar that the song’s narrator considers his base of operations. The album’s most telling passage arrives in “ Sullen Mind,” a song whose raga-like verses establish a scene set in a corner bar. Walker doesn’t say.Īs for “ The Halfwit in Me,” which opens the album in a propulsive stir of fingerpicked guitars, it could be his answer to Nick Lowe’s “The Beast in Me,” but with ravaging inner demons swapped out for something more prosaic. “I Will Ask You Twice” is a gentler, sweeter tune whose title phrase refers to a marriage proposal - but why the need to ask twice? For emphasis? Because she needs to be persuaded? Mr. There’s an equally sly process at work in “Funny Thing She Said,” a slow-drag ballad whose subject is the unraveling of a romance. He ends his new album, “Golden Sings That Have Been Sung,” with a secular meditation called “Age Old Tale.” Delivered over a loping folk-rock drone, in a voice that sounds half-awake but fully present, it’s a blurry report from a bar somewhere: snatches of overheard conversation mingle with aspects of a confessional, yearning but guarded. His songs are rooms to poke around in, rustling the curtains. A single tune might sprawl out to 20 minutes of elastic thrashing by his band the agenda seemed to be hypnotic discovery, even within the parameters of a supposed folk song. Walker was a torchbearer, rather than a trickster.īut if you listened closely to the album, or experienced Mr. From the title to the cover illustration, it sold a convenient fiction: the idea that Mr.

His breakout 2015 album, “Primrose Green,” evoked the pastoral British psychedelia of the late 1960s and early ’70s - Tim Buckley, John Martyn, Nick Drake - with a coy precision that probably went a little too far. Not long ago it was possible to peg Ryley Walker as a pastiche agent, a fingerstyle guitarist and singer-songwriter with a taste for revivalist modes of yesteryear.

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