Remembering the Singular Musician Scott Walker

Scott Walker died on Friday at 76, but his passing was announced only today. Walker was a singular figure in the worlds of both pop and experimental music. For a time in the 1960's, “Swinging London” swung to one group even more than the Beatles – the Walker Brothers, an American group (unrelated to each other and none named Walker) who offered up pop confections like the smash hit “Make It Easy on Yourself.”

Scott Walker’s solo work would become darker, more avant-garde, and more sporadic, as he would disappear from the scene for years while working on albums that displayed an almost obsessive – actually, strike “almost” – an obsessive concern with new and strange sounds. His last few albums, released over a period of about twenty years, used rock, orchestral, electronic, and often unrecognizable other sounds to create large, enigmatic tapestries of words and music. Critics and listeners alike found them chilling, and downright scary.

But Walker himself, while serious about his art, was neither somber nor creepy. All you have to do is listen to the beginning of our 2012 conversation, where I couldn’t even finish my introduction before Scott felt compelled to sort of calm things down…