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“Walter is a musical treasure, an artist of the highest caliber.

To hear him is to be lifted into a mystical sphere. I adore him.” – Judy Collins

“We can play a country church in Mississippi, or we can draw a crowd at a hipster club in Brooklyn. We connect with a wide-ranging audience,” says veteran musician Walter Parks, speaking of the music on his forthcoming album, The Unlawful Assembly (out Sept. 9 via Atomic Sound). “The joy, gratitude, pain and yearning in these songs is universally felt.” 

After studying guitar under jazz guitarist Robert Conti, Parks was a sideman to the legendary Richie Havens for 10 years. He was part of a folk duo called The Nudes, with cellist Stephanie Winters, and has been part of an on-again, off-again band for several years now, called Swamp Cabbage. 

Parks is known for his swampy style and gravelly vocals, as well as being an astute music historian. In 2020, he was invited by The Library of Congress to archive his research on and perform his arrangements of music made by homesteaders in the Okefenokee Swamp. Now living in St. Louis, MO, Parks originally grew up in Northeast Florida (or what he calls “the Georgia part of Florida”). “That was during the Woodstock era, and in spite of the peace and love aspects of that movement, I was bullied for being tall, skinny, short-haired, and also playing the ‘very uncool’ viola,” says Parks. 

At the start of the pandemic, Parks created a Sunday morning radio series called “Hymns & Hollers” to explore a powerful and strange paradox about origins of spiritual music that he believed could unify and heal. The show has no religious agenda per se, but is more historical and philosophical in nature. 

“As a way of enduring hell on Earth and yearning for a better life from the cruel bonds of slavery, African Americans created and sang spirituals, field hollers, code songs and work chants that often borrowed from the Biblical narratives and hymns of their oppressors. Those same spirituals, chants and hollers would soon inspire the great American roots music that followed – blues and jazz which would later inspire gospel, rhythm and blues, soul, folk and rock and roll. Ironically, as if coming full circle, more than a century after emancipation, I and millions of American youth would learn of the blues only because of rock and roll interpretations emanating from England – the country that was once command central for the slave trade and the source of many classic Christian hymns, which influenced the spirituals.”

Parks regards spirituals as a common denominator – an undeniable sonic glue born out of the bonds of slavery, now binding us all together for the common good as reimagined by The Unlawful Assembly, with collaborator/drummer/producer Steven Williams, Ada Dyer on vocals, Paul Frazier on bass, Michael Bellar on organ, and Andrae Murchison on trombone.

“Steal Away,” an Underground Railroad spiritual of Biblical origin, tributes The Mighty Clouds of Joy from the early 60’s. Inspired by Richie Havens’ version of “Follow The Drinking Gourd,” a “code song” reminded runaway slaves how to find and use The North Star. The requisite hymn “Amazing Grace” is a slave ship captain’s redemptive plea upon acknowledging the horrors that his chosen line of work had enabled. “Early In The Mornin”’ tributes Alan Lomax’s original field recording of a Parchman Farm chain-gang chanting in order to strike a piece of track rail in unison. 

“Georgia Rice” is based on an Okefenokee Swamp folktale: During the years when Florida was Spanish, if a slave could escape the rice plantations along the southeast Georgia coast, outrun bounty hunters while heading southwest, evade the natural perils of The Okefenokee Swamp, and then find passage across The St. Mary’s River, they could then make a deal for freedom in exchange for converting to Catholicism, and serving in the Spanish army. Many runaways found their way to Fort Mose, near St. Augustine, to live amongst other former slaves who had endured escape odysseys of their own. 

European families – mostly of Scottish descent – began inhabiting islands in the Okefenokee during the mid-1800’s. They imported festive fiddle reels and they developed their own relationship with the banjo – an instrument of African origin. They brought spiritual music in the form of shaped-note and sacred harp singing. And they brought hollers – beautiful rolling, yodel-like melodies sung by hunters – through the piney woods, to make notice of an approach to home, after having spent several days out in the wilderness.

“Georgia Rice” begins with a holler, but the lyrics are sung from the perspective of a runaway slave who, being pursued by bounty hunters, hears a white man hollerin’ far off in the pineywoods. A great risk, the slave heads towards the white man figuring that no slave tracker would be hollering. “Georgia Rice” overlays two periods in history to convey the hopeful premise that when no one’s watching, we do the right thing. In this case, the white swamper, also at great risk, helps the runaway find The St Mary’s.

“Shoulder It,” Parks’ co-write with Stan Lynch, the original drummer for Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, addresses a core obstacle to societal progress – the convenient perspective that the challenges of any one culture, demographic or race are solely its own to overcome. 

The American imagination pictures the realm of spirituals, blues and jazz in Mississippi or Louisiana but Parks’ inspiration for The Unlawful Assembly comes from southeast Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp. A hundred years after the first slaves fled into the swamp from coastal rice plantations, their descendants returned to lay railroad tracks for The Hebbard Lumber Company. Walter theorizes that during this time, the lyrics of work chants sung in unison by black men while arduously hammering steel, began to find their way into the “old-fashioned songs” and hollers sung by white swampers. 

Jacksonville, in northeastern Florida is regarded by many as the epicenter of southern rock because The Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd formed there. Walter believes that there is a subtle black-influenced “funky” feel (as it was labeled in the seventies) in southern rock that differentiates it from country music and he believes that the music of the nearby Okefenokee was probably a significant factor in this distinguishing aspect.

Parks’ gifts are not only limited to music: “It’s really not possible to just focus on one form of art in the modern age. When sometimes the balance tilts too far away from music, I find refuge in woodworking, studying French, acting and painting in a modern-art style. My wife and I also present concerts.” 

He’s a storyteller and yet, himself, an immovable character. He’s the real deal. He’s Walter Parks.

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Tony Petersen had barely finished creating Real Enough For You Now — the Minnesota native’s debut release as Ditchbird, a solo project launched after the pandemic brought his hard-touring indie rock band, Social Animals (Rise Records), to a temporary standstill — when he began writing songs for a more aggressive, rock-influenced follow-up. 

“The name ‘Ditchbird’ sounds like a folk artist,” he says from his home studio in Minneapolis, where both Real Enough For You Now and the harder-hitting Some Dreams EP were recorded, “but I wanted to make sure people were aware that I’m not going to sing songs with an acoustic guitar on my couch forever. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I have more rock songs in me. It’s the sound I grew up hearing.”

Raised in Cloquet, Minnesota, Petersen discovered rock & roll while riding around town in his father’s car. Those memorable trips — with music on the radio, Petersen in the backseat, and his Dad behind the wheel — left a lasting impression. Petersen began playing electric guitar and eventually hit the road with Social Animals, opening for acts like Dashboard Confessional and All-American Rejects, while playing an anthemic, modernized version of the genre that had first captivated him. Along the way, he stockpiled a number of newly-written songs that didn’t necessarily gel with Social Animals’ cathartic stomp. Those songs piled up, unused, for years, then found their way onto Ditchbird’s full-length debut, Real Enough For You Now, in early 2021. 

If Real Enough For You Now merged Petersen’s abilities as a multi-instrumentalist with Americana influences, folk-rock arrangements, and scaled-down sonics, then Some Dreams finds him plugging in and turning up. “Better Than Nothing” is a heavy-footed rocker that both salutes and skewers the road-warrior lifestyle, while “Think She Was Right” rides a guitar riff and drum loop toward its own hook-filled horizon. Throughout it all, Petersen pulls triple-duty as singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer. He keeps the guest list small, with keyboardist Ben Cosgrove and mastering engineer Bruce Templeton serving as the only collaborators on what is otherwise a one-man record. 

“Real Enough was a collection of songs I had been sitting on for a long time, and once that was complete, I fell quickly into a distinct group of songs in a very different sound and different voice,” he says of the five-song EP. “I knew I wanted to showcase more electric guitar, more powerful instrumentation, and more aggressive vocals. I clicked into a different place, spontaneously. I immediately wanted to get back to work while I had the time to do so this summer, and I felt I really needed to make this next collection happen, to show a different side of Ditchbird.”

Petersen’s music has always been multi-faceted. With Social Animals, he’s an internationally-celebrated rocker and lead guitarist, adding atmosphere and attitude to songs built for stadiums. With Real Enough For You, he scaled his songwriting back to its acoustic roots, reworking the influence of Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, and The Replacements to his own brand of heartland folk-rock. Now, with Some Dreams, he punctuates songs about the artistic experience — the elation, the anxiety, and the long drives from one show to the next — with guitar-heavy arrangements that nod to his rock & roll roots. This is Petersen’s story, but it’s our story, too: a universal tale about chasing down one’s dreams, set to a soundtrack that’s as melodic as it is muscular.

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When tuning into A Matter of Time’s first track “Requiem,” it’s not hard to imagine the Doof Warrior (of Mad Max:Fury Road fame) orchestrating some manic Fellini-esque carnival and finally finding his perfect drummer. As the drum set shatters in a moment of hardcore jazz lunacy, we are thrust into the opening salvo of producer, solo artist, and shit-kicking drummer Giovanni Carnuccio III’s new album. 

The majestic splinter of this head-turning intro perfectly conveys his unadulterated and singular style of clattering boom-bap drums, jazzy progressions, western-influenced guitar hooks, and blissed out orchestrations, all of which makes for as unique an artistic vision as you are likely to see all year. Of course, the ability to make records like this wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for his decade plus of hard work, be it in his solo efforts or in his litany of production work with artists like Zach Aaron, Jason Eady, Courtney Patton, Turnpike Troubadours and a bevy of others in the indie/folk/Americana canon. In fact, it’s this hard work that has earned him countless wins & nods at year-end award shows, most prominently a “Best Americana Album” Grammy nomination with John Fullbright for their work on From the Ground Up. 

While enduring the pandemic like the rest of the world, Carnuccio was struck by – and still exists within – a stretch of creative inspiration, using the past year to let his freak-flag fly: “[I] invaded an acoustic record with synths because so many normal everyday interactions and communications with people had just been forced onto screens.” Surprisingly, though Carnuccio has made a reputation for himself being a polymath on the Americana scene, A Matter of Time defies classification by mixing elements of psych-rock, trip-hop, jazz, and Ennio Moriconne, all while maintaining frenetic, whiplash rhythms. Aforementioned opener “Requiem” might be a daunting show of skill in someone else’s hands, but Carnuccio imbues it with the skittering immediacy and fluidity of Busta Rhymes – an inspiration on this song and others. Songs like “Hot Time Traveler” ride a Massive Attack-like gait, with clacking drums, while the strings and guitars create an acid-drenched dreamscape. And then there’s “PCHDMT,” which wouldn’t feel entirely out of place on say – Rosalia’s last record, all fluttering flamenco guitars and ebullient strings, with an additionally healthy serving of the psychedelic. Appropriately, the song itself was inspired by Carnuccio’s own trips down the Pacific Coast Highway. 

Elsewhere, the playfully titled “Baby Godzilla Steps” tethers jazzy piano stabs to phased-out keyboards, giving us what you can imagine Mark Ronson and Tame Impala might create if they indulged their more cinematic tendencies. Fittingly, the album’s closing track “Why is This Happening” is also its most contemplative, lush, and engrossing, as Carnuccio utilizes his gift for creating atmospheric orchestrations and takes direct aim for the heartstrings. Pathos aside, these are songs that are “designed to be jammed out by a badass live band,” a vibe easily heard in the album’s expertly executed psychedelia; while being careful not to downplay or overstate the importance of their role in his early oeuvre as a solo artist, Carnuccio credits DMT, mushrooms, peyote, and other mind-altering subs with deference. 

At this point, Carnuccio half-jokes, he is hoping for this whole “folk Mark Ronson shit to take off” before wryly qualifying that he might actually be “like an Italian unplugged Dr. Dre or something.” All jokes aside, this isn’t too far from the truth as his creative touch has added a dash of the cutting edge to a genre steeped in obstinate traditionalism. Instead of allowing himself to sit in tradition, Carnuccio aims to innovate by taking cues from the atmospherics of Nine Inch Nails, the pluckiness of the Punch Brothers or Cornelius, and the orchestral dramatics of Spaghetti Western classics.

Carnuccio’s genre-melding style, though lighthearted and playful, conveys a much more timely and heartfelt message than you might expect. Whatever the future holds for Giovanni as an artist, producer, and musician, now we have A Matter of Time, a kaleidoscopic journey reminding us to embrace creativity and cast our fate to the wind.

“Mouth-watering sonic clarity, modern flourishes that’ll make a gunslinger gawk, and bizarrely beautiful instrumentals.” – KUTX 98.9

“An acid-drenched dreamscape.” – VENTS Magazine