There is the obvious influence of Jacques Brel on Walker's own writing and songs by the Belgian feature on the first three albums (most Anglophones come to Brel through Walker, so we owe him a debt for that alone). They are impressionist paintings in song. Although they sit together neatly and share quite brilliant orchestration by Wally Stott, Peter Knight and John Franz, they also show a huge variety of touch and mood. As a run of great records it has few equals. The lyrics of 1966’s “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” written by Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio and originally recorded in 1965 by Frankie Valli, are supersaturated versions of platitudes: “Loneliness is a cloak you wear / A deep shade of blue is always there.” Walker’s delivery, and the string pileup around him, get at the apocalyptic stakes of this heartbreak.So much of Walker’s “serious” reputation rests on Scott 1 to Scott 4 from the late Sixties. Even then, something intense and mystical marked Walker’s take on conventions set by the likes of Roy Orbison and Phil Spector. Vocal beauty and earnest exertion are traditionally the provenance of love songs, the likes of which propelled the Walker Brothers to briefly rival the Beatles for fame in the mid-’60s. At first, he capitalized on that style’s accessibility. In a tone as pungent and thick as hair gel, his phrasings presumed that “conversational” could never be a virtue.

Walker’s voice was a prime model in a great American line stretching through lounge legends and Andrew Lloyd Webber hambones. There’s a reason that the title of 1969’s “30th Century Man” only felt more apt over time, up through his final work on the soundtrack for the demented pop-star satire of 2018’s Vox Lux.

After his death at 76, he’ll now be remembered as having pulled off one of the greatest shape-shifting acts in any artistic medium ever.īut maybe his career should not be seen as a series of departures, but rather as a continuum.

An Ohio boy who became an idol in the smiley ’60s trio the Walker Brothers, Walker transitioned into making auteurist chamber pop, vanished from the public eye, and reemerged in the ’90s with acclaimed experimental compositions involving hammered meat, executioner-blade shings!, and fart sounds. Scott Fitzgerald’s line that there are no second acts in American life.

Best scott walker songs