Chicago Soul Artist Walker Shares “You And I,”
Chicago songwriter and guitar virtuoso Walker Landgraf started sharing his second full-length album just about two months after his debut from late last year, Phew. Simply sharing his music as Walker, the prolific home recording artist just shared the fourth single from the upcoming album Good Man, the soulful and home-recorded “you and i” that he dedicates to all the classic love songs that use the same title.
Walker recently broke 1 million streams on his first single, “It’s Not (Her Eyes),” and he’s sharing his second album Good Man later this summer. He even passed on being cast in The Voice this year to focus on recording music at home. Under The Radar summed up his music, writing he “strikes a balance between pop simplicity and instrumental intricacies.”
The balance between his affinity for pop and his musical prowess lies at the center of Walker’s music. While he’s currently based in Chicago, he grew up in LA and studied music in NYC, and he still regularly plays jazz gigs when he’s not working on his soul pop music at home. He records nearly every single instrument on all his music, outside of a few featured friends, to create intelligent but soulful, pop-based music.
Landgraf said he “was inspired by the fact there are so many classic love songs of the past generation with the same title. Off the top of my head, I can think of ‘you and i’ by Stevie Wonder and the bossa nova standard ‘Você e Eu’ by Carlos Lyra and Vinicius de Moraes. I often think about the fact that when you listen to the generation of songwriters before me, (many of whom are my personal heroes) you can hear that they have a total belief in the power of love to change the world.”
He continued, “It sounds like such a simple thing but when I look at my generation I often feel like we could use some of that belief ourselves. So I wanted to make a song for my generation that connects us to this tradition. And I wanted the song to be simple and innocent, and confident in its own innocence if that makes sense.”