Ryley Rourke

Ryley Walker currently resides in New York City. But his latest LP is a Chicago record in spirit. The masterful Course In Fable, the songwriter’s fifth solo effort, draws from the deep well of that city’s fertile 1990s scene, when bands like Tortoise, The Sea and Cake and Gastr del Sol were reshaping the underground, mixing and matching indie rock, jazz, prog and beyond.

On The Lillywhite Sessions, Ryley Walker and the similarly indebted trio of drummer Ryan Jewell and bassist Andrew Scott Young cover Dave Matthews' infamously abandoned 2001 art-rock masterpiece of the same name, a record where he and his band indulged a new adult pathos and a budding musical wanderlust. With a delicate rhythmic latticework and vocals that ask you to lean in, "Busted Stuff" recalls Jim O' Rourke's golden Drag City days.

One of the most famous Dylanisms arose from a conversation with director Sam Peckinpah on the set of the 1973 movie Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. “Just be yourself,” Peckinpah suggested to a 32-year-old Bob Dylan who, by this point, had already been everything from folk messiah to rock Judas, who had received glowing reviews and miserable ones, who once stood as a pillar of New York authenticity and was now struggling to play the role of a mysterious stranger in a Western movie filmed in Durango, Mexico. Fittingly, Dylan snapped back to Peckinpah: “Which one?”