“I Me Mine,” came on next and, he said, “I loved it for two reasons: It’s almost like a kid’s nonsense song—’I Me Mine, I Me Mine’—and it has a beautiful minor key melody.” Throughout his childhood, Walker says he invented imaginary bands like the Beatles in his head. He drew album covers, made up little hooks and pieces of songs, but didn’t take songwriting seriously until he started playing with a band in high school.
Walker was listening again to some of the music that influenced him while working on A Little Too Late, particularly Jackson Browne. When he sent demos of his new songs to Lincoln Schleifer, who had produced his first solo album as well as some of The Brilliant Mistakes’ projects, Schleifer responded, without prompting, “Let’s do this like an early Jackson Browne record.”
Walker credits his collaboration with Schleifer, who also plays bass and percussion on the album, with the development of his songs. Schleifer had an idea of the how each song should sound, Walker, says, “then we brought the right people in to see what happens.” On A Little Too Late, they enlisted Rob Schwimmer, whom Walker calls “one of the most brilliant musicians you’ll ever hear or meet.” A classical pianist and one of the world’s top theremin players, Schwimmer played a Hammond B3, synthesizer, claviola, taisho harp, and—according to album credits—the kitchen sink on the album. Jon Herington, a session musician who tours with Steely Dan and other major acts, played electric guitar, and John Morgan Kimock joined on drums. A number of guests instrumentalists and vocalists were added as well.
Some of the album’s tracks were drawn from fragments of songs from what Walker calls his “slush pile.” “Mama Kat,” the first single released to radio, had been unfinished for years until Walker added a bridge. Larry Campbell joined on acoustic guitar and pedal steel to put finishing touches on the track. “Wait,” another unfinished song idea originally conceived as a piano ballad, was given more of an R&B feel. Teresa Williams and Lucy Kaplansky provided background vocals for “Wait,” as well as the title track, and “Only Son,” which Walker calls one of the saddest songs he has written.
He wrote “Only Son” at a time when three different people close to him had lost sons, but the song became the story of one, a mother who lost her son twice—once when separated after the fall of Saigon and later when he died of cancer alone in his apartment. The simple arrangement, with a pair of cellos, treads the line between tender and sorrowful.
The choir-like vocal harmonies on “A Little Too Late” complement Walker’s lead vocals, which have a vulnerable quality. The Beatles’ influence can be detected in the tempo shift of the song. The lyrics are a nod to Walker’s work in publishing:
It’s a little too late for us to try and read between the lines.
I’m no open book, but then again I’m hardly half inclined
to offer you all my heart when it’s impossible to gauge.
There’ll be a better place to start
instead of nibbling at the contents page.
The song, says Walker, is a subconscious nod to a couple of great songs by songwriters he admires who manage to write a serious moving song with hilarious lines. “A little humor,” he says, “can get you through a hard song.”
Ironically, one of the most light-hearted songs is “Town Called Misery.” With a pop vibe, the lyrics tell the listener, “There’s nothing left for you in this town” adding an encouragement to “take the next bus out of this town.” The song’s tone is enhanced by Schwimmer’s instrumental magic and by Walker’s clever lyrics spelling S-O-R-R-Y and I-T-O-L-D-Y-O-U So.
Walker has kept one foot in the world of music performance and recording, while working full-time in academic publishing, a comfortable marriage of words and music. For almost twenty years, Walker fronted The Brilliant Mistakes, who took their name from the title of a song by one of their heroes Elvis Costello.
“Balancing [the day job and the band] was hard in my 40s,” says Walker, “traveling, playing all the time, and then going to work. If we drove to a show, even six hours away, like Vermont, we’d drive back that same night to be in our beds because it made life saner. I sometimes joked that I went to work to recover from playing on the weekend.”
“The Brilliant Mistakes played together until I was almost fifty years old, when I moved out of the city with my wife to Connecticut. The band had reached its end, as bands do, and it was very amicable. I’ve very fortunate to have been in two long-standing bands in my life, and in bands in high school and college, and we are still very close friends. The beauty of a band—when it’s the right kind of band—is the way you collaborate and support each other’s music and sharpen each other.”
Once the band dissolved, Walker says, “I got back into solo recording because there was still so much music that I wanted to record. I felt it was time to for me, with my own records, to let my own songs stand for themselves.” After he completed his first solo project Something Up My Sleeve, COVID put the brakes on any plans for touring. During the time, though, he noted that people from all over the world listened to his music through streaming.
Walker started working at home in 2020, which, he noted, “allowed me free time. I used to commute about three hours a day to the city, but now I had that time to do all that I wanted to—and that was music.” He decided to make another record, and he put together a band and started playing close to home, around New York City. Playing close to home on a schedule he determines, he says, helps keep him grounded.
Seeing lines between his work and his passions is nothing new for Walker. He says, “When I was a kid, I loved to read, but when I had to read for school, it felt like a different thing. I experienced that with music too when I was in school. We had music classes, but I didn’t really love music.” While he was drawn to the Beatles, he said, he never connected them to what he learned at school.
“I was listening to Revolver and excited about The Beatles records, but then in elementary music class and in fifth grade, when they taught us how to play recorder, I didn’t think they were the same,” he said.
He credits his piano teacher Mrs. Chase, a “jolly French woman,” with making a difference in his life. She taught him piano lessons in the summers, which he spent with his family in a small town in the Berkshires. He says, “We would read and play pieces; then the second half of each lesson, we played duets, and I played her pump organ. It was always fun, but I still didn’t connect those lessons to taking music in school.” Only when he got to high school and started playing in bands for fun did it dawn on him that he loved music.
When Walker writes music, he says, he can’t force it. “I can’t say, ‘I’m going to write a song about this’ and make it happen. I know other people have different ways of writing, but for me, it has to feel like play.” He writes on his piano or keyboard in his basement. “When I’m writing, I need to be in a space where I put my hands on the keys and see what sounds good, see if a melody strikes and words pop out.”
Writing songs, he says, is not as easy now as it was in his 20s and 30s. “It’s more of a challenge. It’s harder to get into that space where I just let go of everything and things come out. But my standards are also higher; I understand form more than I did.” From first to last, with A Little Too Late, Walker has crafted an album of music that invites listeners, he says, “to interpret. . . on their own, adding their own thoughts, dreams, biases. I’ll leave them to decide exactly what version they want to hear.”
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