Chris Eckman: One of America's Most Underrated Songwriters

Let me begin by saying, I’m biting off way more than I can chew here.

From 1987-2011, Chris Eckman’s Seattle band, the Walkabouts released 12 albums and Chris & Carla (Chris Eckman and Carla Torgerson, the two mainstays behind the Walkabouts) released three. And from 2004-2025, Eckman also released five solo albums. Plus, Eckman has recorded another five albums with his international band, Dirtmusic. Their cover of VU’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties” from their album BKO, recorded in Mali in 2006, is one of the most mind-blowing things I’ve ever heard.

I’m not going to write about all 25 of these albums, because who’s got time to listen to 25 albums by an artist they’ve probably never heard before?

Instead, I’m going to try to make a case for Chris Eckman as one of the great American songwriters of the last 40 years by pointing you in the direction of his 20 finest recordings. Two of them are covers, including the VU cover mentioned above. The other 18 are originals.

The right place to start would be the opening track from the Walkabouts’ third album, Scavenger in 1990, “Dead Man Rise.” A rare tight and catchy rocker for Eckman.

The Walkabouts’ critically acclaimed 1993 album Satisified Mind, meanwhile is an album of covers by songwriters as wide-ranging as Gene Clark, John Cale, Robert Forster, and Nick Cave. But it’s the album opener and title track, an old country standard by written by Joe “Red” Hayes and Jack Rhodes, made famous by Porter Wagoner in 1955, that steals the show.

By this time, Chris and Carla had decamped to Europe. Getting away from the Seattle scene that had made superstars out of Nirvana and Pearl Jam turned out to be the best possible choice for Eckman, because he was never going to be superstar. He was as preoccupied with gothic folk and country and roots music as he was with rock ‘n’ roll. He has more of a musical and lyrical kinship with songwriters like Townes Van Zandt, Leonard Cohen, and even Neil Young than he does with Kurt Cobain or Eddie Vedder.

In 1994, the Walkabouts released their hardest rocking album, Setting the Woods on Fire. Album opener “Good Luck Morning” is one of Eckman’s finest rock songs; “Bordertown” the song where he found the sound he has been returning to ever since; and “Up in the Graveyard” a six minute masterpiece.

Chris & Carla’s debut album, Life Full of Holes, came the following year and may still be my favorite album they ever made together. It’s hard to even narrow this album down to its five best songs, but here goes: “Storm Crazy” w/Peter Buck, “Death at Low Water,” “Comfort of a Stranger,” “Take Me” w/the Tindersticks, and the short, but sweet “Never Gonna Fall.”

From the Walkabouts Devil’s Road in 1996, add “The Light Will Stay On” to your playlist, and from 1997’s Nighttown, I’d recommend “Lift Your Burdens Up.”

I’m going to skip over Chris & Carla’s second album, Swinger 500, and proceed directly to the Walkabouts’ 1999 album Trail of Stars. You definitely need to hear “Straight to the Stars,” a magnificent Walkabouts outlier containing drum loops.

From the 2001 Walkabouts album, Ended up a Stranger, there are at least four essential Eckman classics: “Lazarus Heart,” “Radiant,” “More Heat Than Light,” and “Climb.”

And from the last Walkabouts album from 2011, Travels in the Dustland, their hardest rocking album since Setting the Woods on Fire. you at least need to hear the gorgeous album opener “My Diviner.”

Of Chris Eckman’s four solo albums, this year’s The Land We Knew the Best is the one that rates with his finest work. I dare you not to love “Buttercup.”

Eckman has lived in Slovenia with his wife and family for the last two decades.

Happy Memorial Day weekend!