{"id":20317,"date":"2021-02-07T05:30:29","date_gmt":"2021-02-07T10:30:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=20317"},"modified":"2020-12-08T16:50:19","modified_gmt":"2020-12-08T21:50:19","slug":"seth-walker-opens-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2021\/02\/07\/seth-walker-opens-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Seth Walker Opens Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

This feature was first published in <\/em>Bold Life Magazine.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Seth Walker was born in a tiny town \u2013 really<\/i> tiny \u2013 and was trained from an early age in classical music. So the fact that he ended up playing his own steeped-in-the-blues music is a bit surprising. But to the North Carolina-born songwriter and guitarist, it all fits together. And it’s all part of his ongoing musical journey, one that continues to lead in even more unexpected directions.<\/p>\n

Growing up in the 1970s and ’80s in Altamahaw Ossippee, North Carolina (pop. 996), Walker absorbed the best qualities of small town living. \u201cI’ve always loved simple music and songs that had depth.\u201d But as a child, he was focused on a very different tradition. He studied violin and cello; his parents taught the Suzuki method.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Classical music and a rural town might not seem to go together, but in Walker’s family’s case, they did. \u201cMy father had been teaching music in Burlington,\u201d he recalls. \u201cMy parents befriended another couple who were looking at buying land way out there. After seeing 20 acres of beauty, they decided to build one home and live communally under one roof. A grand idea; a bold, forward-thinking one tinged with a long-haired hippie vibe,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was<\/i> 1974, after all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once he was in college, Walker discovered the modern electric blues of artists like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. The music of those artists led him back to earlier blues legends.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt really struck a nerve,\u201d he says. \u201cI bought a cheap Stratocaster, and I just sat in my dorm room bending strings. I remember how good it felt that [the music] wasn’t on a page; I don’t even know what it was, but I knew that it was speaking to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Things proceeded quickly from there; by 1998 he had recorded and released his debut album, When it Rains it Pours<\/i>. Walker concedes that his music doesn’t always fit neatly into the stylistic box that is the blues. \u201cWhether it’s called the blues or not, it comes from there,\u201d he says. Noting that other styles like jazz are rooted in the blues as well, he suggests that his musical inspiration \u201cmay be as simple as emotion.\u201d Blues is more a feeling than a genre, after all.<\/p>\n

But Walker didn’t abandon his background in classical music. Instead he used it as a foundation to make better original music. \u201cAs I started to get into [guitar], I realized that my fingers had been on strings for so long,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd as I started to dive into blues, I leaned more toward the jazzy side: people like T-bone Walker, Clarence \u201cGatemouth\u201d Brown, Louis Jordan and Charlie Christian.<\/p>\n

The relative sophistication of their music \u2013 compared to straight-ahead 12-bar blues \u2013 appealed to Walker. He found that he was drawn toward music that displayed \u201ca little more harmonic depth,\u201d he says, noting that \u201cclassical music is centered around harmony. So that definitely came in handy.\u201d And the rhythmic complexity of classical music influenced him to write blues-based music that colored outside the lines as well.<\/p>\n

All those qualities are reflected in Walker’s music. Released in 2019, Are You Open?<\/i> is his tenth full-length release, and shows him crafting songs that fold in elements of rhythm and blues, soul and rock. He’s a modern artist, a fact underscored by his approach to making the new album. Rather than beginning by composing a lyric, a guitar lick or a melody, he employed rhythm tracks as his starting point.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was unknown territory for me,\u201d he admits. \u201cMost of the tunes started off with one-chord or trance grooves.\u201d He says that using an unfamiliar approach to composition yielded unexpected results. \u201cI’ve found myself surprised more on this album than any other I have ever done,\u201d Walker says.<\/p>\n

Are You Open?<\/i> is a departure from Walker’s previous work in another way. It finds him venturing into the kind of lyrical territory he’s largely avoided in the past. Though he doesn’t think of it as such, Billboard<\/i> Magazine characterized \u201cNo More Will\u201d as a political song.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was pretty personal for me,\u201d he admits. \u201cBecause I’d never really written any kind of topical piece. I wanted to [address] all that’s surrounding us and affecting our society in such a sad and harmful way, but I wanted to talk about without a jagged edge.\u201d Walker’s goal with \u201cNo More Will\u201d \u2013 and with much of his lyric writing \u2013 is to focus on what we all have in common. \u201cWe’re a lot more alike than we are different,\u201d he says. \u201cIt sounds clich\u00e9, but I do believe it’s true: the only answer is love.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This feature was first published in Bold Life Magazine. Seth Walker was born in a tiny town \u2013 really tiny \u2013 and was trained from an early age in classical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20318,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,41],"tags":[4414],"class_list":["post-20317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blues","category-interview","tag-seth-walker","cat-9-id","cat-41-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20317"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20319,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20317\/revisions\/20319"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}