WILL DAILEY RELEASES GOLDEN WALKER ALBUM TODAY
Boston artist Will Dailey has released Golden Walker, an 11 song meditation on life and how to navigate it within our current cultural climate. Golden Walker is Dailey’s second album released outside of the major label system. The album is a follow up to National Throat, his indie debut, that went on to receive numerous awards including Album and Artist of the Year at the Boston Music Awards, Song of the Year and Producer of the Year at the New England Music Awards, Best of the Year by Improper Bostonian Magazine, debuted in the top 20 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart, and garnered over 9 Million streams on Spotify.
In a world of instant gratification Dailey is challenging listeners to sit and savor the songs on this album. Twangville said that Golden Walker “is generally pensive and restrained, challenging the listener to dig into the songs. Those who do will be amply rewarded.”
According to the Boston Globe, “ the closer one listens, the more ‘Golden Walker’ reveals itself a hard-won product of that interim. Partly, it’s about current events. It’s not essential to know that the Women’s March of 2017 inspired ‘Bad Behavior’ — it could be a general celebration of rule-breaking — but that knowledge draws the lyrical threads tight. ‘He Better Be Alive,’ meanwhile, is inescapably about the horror of ‘Baltimore, Carolina, Staten Island,’ even without recognizing the title refrain as the words of Keith Scott’s wife as a North Carolina police officer fatally shot him in 2016.”
Dailey started the album as a handbook on accountability, but as the writing progressed it morphed into so much more. Not only do the songs on Golden Walker, serve as social commentary, but they are meditations on life and the struggles, both internal and external, that come with aging and just plainly existing on the planet. “ It’s an album, Daily says “about being an adult and feeling like a lost child.”
The idea for this album was sparked by a once in a lifetime interaction Dailey had a with a sculptor in France who heard his set in the tiny village Dailey was playing one night several years ago. The sculptor told Dailey “All the gold is being take from our world. They take it all to use in technological devices that are supposed to help us communicate. The gold is disappearing, hidden in phones and computers that only leave us feeling more alone, separated and disconnected. When I heard you tonight through the walls of my workshop, I heard real communication. I heard you. You are a communicator.” He then sculpted and gifted Will a sculpture of a man with a gold nugget on his foot called “The Golden Walker,” and told Dailey that he had to be a keeper and protector of the gold and to keep communicating through music; he had to become a “Golden Walker.”
“He evokes a Paul Simon intricacy at times, a Jeff Buckley fragility at others, topping it with challenging folk-pop and a breezy, almost Motown soul flair in the first single, 'Bad Behavior.' The clincher for me is 'He Better Be Alive,' a driving, percussive track inspired by the nightly news. Dailey has a wonderfully elastic voice, a natural sense of poetry, and a restless mind that looks for answers and often takes us to them.” Steve Morse (longtime Boston Globe staff pop critic, current Rock History at Berklee College of Music)
“Loneliness is an epidemic,” says Dailey. “Content is tyrannical. Being together has atrophied, as evident in our leadership crisis and cultural absurdity. Being present with each other should really be in abundance. The aspect of being human should come first. Yet our limitless interconnectivity limits our connection.” Golden Walker is Dailey’s way of adding compost to the soil for the coming spring and a world that thrives on genuine connection and where truth and accountability not only prosper, but are celebrated.
TOUR DATES
6/8 Hot Stove Cool Music Chicago, IL
6/9 GMan Tavern Chicago, IL
6/14 Bourbon & Branch Philadelphia, PA
6/15 Fete Lounge Providence, RI
6/16 ONCE Somerville, MA
6/30 Bath Heritage Festival Bath, ME
7/14 Nextival Crownsville, MD
8/2 Miles of Music Appleton, WI
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