THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Whitney Walker has not followed a linear course during his strange and epic journey through the music industry. The former addict spent years dealing with alcoholism, drug use and stretches of homelessness, all while somehow raising two children. Despite seemingly constant torment, Walker spent his early adulthood touring and releasing music with a slew of indie projects — all ambitions and agendas inevitably falling into the abyss of depression and addiction.
At one point, he hit rock bottom with an attempted suicide that resulted in two emergency open-heart surgeries, and he still wears the scars to this day. Like any of the wounds Walker suffered via years in the gutters, scars heal with time — time spent in remembrance and reflection, and internal occupation, something he spent years trying to escape. In so many ways, Walker’s music encapsulates both the perilous odyssey and journey of redemption home, times spent in murky passage, and times between incidents, the aftermaths. Through all of this, Walker’s songs march, forever and triumphantly, and most importantly, fearlessly, through the valleys of life and death. For this reason, his songs have come to symbolize the bizarre pageant that freethinkers, independent philosophers and artists, often find themselves a part of. This is music from the jagged edges where Walker has spent much of his life.
In 2023, Walker independently released his first album under his own name, A Dog Staring Into A Mirror On The Floor. The acclaimed LP captured a diverse audience almost overnight. Recorded during the pandemic, the charming collection introduced listeners to Walker’s adroit lyricism and dark wit, as well as his ability to put complex emotions and themes into a two-minute ditty — no small feat. The album also received a huge contribution from Dana Colley, baritone saxophonist of Morphine / Vapors of Morphine, and would garner glowing coverage from well-known media outlets. On the new EP Where To Go And How To Get There, Colley is again featured on three of four tracks, and bass clarinet and flute in addition to baritone sax. The EP is immaculately produced by Dan Capaldi (Demos For All) and mastered at Chillhouse Studios by Will Holland (Pixies, Dead Can Dance).
From the onset, Walker and crew set an entirely new tone with Where To Go And How To Get There. Robert Mitchell’s steady, hard-hitting drumming is more emergent and present, and the thick backbeat he provides, combined with Capaldi’s melodic basslines, create a pulsing, breathing, even, cadenced foundation that certainly represents an evolution in Whitney’s sound. Mitchell and Capaldi have spent the past few years touring as Walker’s rhythm section, and there is a definite live feel to the EP. The sorrows, regrets and laments are all still present, but there are an urgency and vigor in these newfound steps. It is the sound of a songwriter and a band catching stride together, and the results are splendid indeed.
“We built these tracks around Robert’s drums, which we pulled out of many live in-studio performances, and gave each other the time to compose parts and hone existing parts to maximize their impact. Dan wouldn’t let us move on to the next performance until we had the best track we were capable of,” explains Walker. The EP opens with an ominous guitar intro accompanied by organ on Orangutan, performed eloquently by keyboardist Tyler Quist (Jaw Gems), who is featured throughout the EP. Walker sings “Your name is an apostrophe!” after the band launch into a full-throttle death waltz, and it is impossible not to find oneself cozying up to the anguish of self-self doubt when Walker follows that line with “She gives me air when I come up to breathe / A daily reprieve from my terminal disease.” It takes a true wordsmith and crackerjack to describe, so honestly, how love always seems to really be, difficult and challenging. In reverence and praise to Walker’s better halves, the characters in his songs always haunt actively, like restless ghosts who still have something to say and a reason to hang around.
“The first song is about a friend who I had never met in person who I thought was someone else who I didn’t really know from childhood so it has a Kafka-esque Amerika vibe of imagining a situation in perfect ignorance,” says Walker. “It weaves in and out Scientology, cults, a love that is forever frozen in time and imagining a group as cartoons.”
An Owl Hoots Your Name At Night is a funky romp that really shines, with Quist’s playing on full display and Colley’s eccentric clarinet and flute surfacing throughout. Tension And Release finds Walker in more familiar territory. In it he sings, almost defiantly, that he “never thought it could be like this, to taste your blood as we kiss.” It is a rare type of intimacy that Walker is able to achieve with his lyrical imagery, and there are windows into rooms throughout the entire EP. The listener is always invited to look; in fact, Walker seems to be tempting them to do exactly that with almost every stanza.
The record closes with the upbeat George Jetson’s Wife, and Walker and crew seem more than content to lead us on to the next valley of life or death — likely on a collision course with past, present and future, all the while humming a lil ditty. On this gnarled and weathered path is where Whitney’s music lives, always there for you to find it when you need it.”
