Home in Harmony: Walden Frontman Richard Becker Is Going Solo

Richard Becker wrote an entire album with no plans of putting it out.

It wasn't because he felt ashamed of the work. For years, the guitarist-vocalist of longtime indie band Walden wrote side solo songs, mostly personal reflections of his childhood back in his native Georgia, where he grew up like most ’90s kids did. In revisiting those rose-colored memories, he recalls roaming the outdoors untethered and his family’s backyard playground — a safe haven during adolescence.

“I think we really lived in a beautiful era where you could just go explore and mess around outside and meet up with friends and ride bikes until the sun set,” the thirty-year-old shares. “I thought it was a very special upbringing that probably kids don’t have as much these days. I can’t fathom growing up and having my brain developed in those formative years with the amount of technology currently going on."

Those “golden days,” as Becker refers to them, are distant echoes at this point. After attending the University of Georgia and starting Walden in Athens (also the hometown of Widespread Panic), Becker and his bandmates moved to Nashville to build a bigger fanbase. But Walden collectively decided to move west three years ago, landing in Denver with visions of establishing itself on the local live circuit.

“Athens has a very rich and exciting music scene. We started in a fifty-cap little side bar room and worked our way up to the Georgia Theatre. It was cool to be a college band that had to climb the ladder in a small amount of time,” Becker says.

“Then you go into the ocean of Nashville, which makes you question everything. I would say it’s a very resourceful town, but it’s not the best place to build a fanbase, and we’re a big live band,” he continues. “The Denver music scene is really interesting. Honestly, I haven’t figured it out. It’s been a little bit challenging.”

At the same time Becker found himself settling into his new Colorado digs, his parents sold their family home in Marietta, Georgia. The finality of such a shift sparked him to immortalize those bygone times in his debut effort, Cedar Forks, set to drop independently on Friday, July 25. He’ll share it live during a release show Tuesday, August 5, at Two Moons, with Denver neo-folk artist Lauren Frihauf providing support.

The title references his former neighborhood, which is the “cornerstone of the album,” as he sees it.

“It kind of clicked for me that all these songs have some correlation to growing up, coming of age. Putting all these songs through that lens helped clarify their meaning to me and their meaning for the project,” he says. “It’s all about those formative experiences from high school until thirty. Some would say that’s being an adult, but all these songs are about growing up and what I experienced in my neighborhood."
But he admits that he struggled with whether to publish the personal requiems. “I was debating not releasing the album, to be honest," he says. "I wrote it to summarize that chapter of my life and to put a bow on it. I didn’t want the external to impact the internal value of it to me, because it means everything to me.

“But I think I just had the thought these are human experiences and I felt that other people would resonate with it, even if only a handful of people the music reached,” he continues. “It’s a coming-of-age album. It’s all about experiences most people have, but they’re unique to me.”

Previously shared singles, as well as June’s teaser EP, Between the Minds, offer a glimpse into Becker’s nostalgic-laced approach. “Rooftops” is about how he and his friends spent humid summer days rollicking in the woods, building fires and traveling on two-wheels before cooling off in the evenings by laying out on a familiar rooftop, chatting it up and sharing secrets, all while listening to the songs of the cicadas and red-tailed hawks.

The acoustic indie-folk ballads of “Ripples” and “5am” evoke the messiness and missteps of teenage angst and ensuing maturity. “There’s definitely some baggage with these songs,” Becker says. “Heartbreak, grief and losing people, your loved ones. A song or so about faith. Figuring out what you believe in evolves so much over the years and is so powerful to you when you grow up. Family. All the things that you deal with as a teenager and young adult. It’s all in there.”

Looking ahead, he’s unsure if he’ll continue to release his own material, but what this personal odyssey uncovered is Becker’s innate singer-songwriter ability. While that's not necessarily the same as what he does with Walden, it’s uniquely his.

“I’ve carved out my own sound — which I’d say is more my roots — as a songwriter that’s always come really naturally to me,” he explains. “I think this is my sound as me as an artist. It’s a much different process. This is my first time really putting out my own music that I can say is my sound and my story and journey of the past fifteen years of writing music and listening to music and growing up.”

Becker is speaking with us from Los Angeles, where Walden is working on something, though he can’t say exactly what. And we won’t speculate. The conversation shifts back and forth from Becker’s current focuses to his past, as he reminisces about what’s all gone into his solo endeavor. He surmises it’s truly been a lifelong effort that’s finally come to fruition. All the emotions finally bubbling up take form in lyrics and subsequent tracklist, like audio diary entries.

He starts to muse about his path from small-town Georgia to the Mile High metropolis. But he keeps going back to Cedar Forks, the physical place his spirit still calls home. He’s been there numerous times since striking out on his own, including when a foreign for-sale sign signaled it would be the last visit to his parents' house. Even after, Becker makes a point to pass through that part of town and check in on how it’s doing...because the memories still live there.

“I go back every time I’m in Atlanta. I go back every time and I walk around, and all those memories come flooding back to me,” he says, adding that leaving them behind after his parents moved felt so strange.

“That was a very interesting moment in my life. Like, ‘Wow, all those memories and everything I experienced in that house and neighborhood, all those core memories, are still with me even though I’m not able to access that physical place,’” Becker continues. “I did feel like I’m putting a bow on growing up and all of those experiences now that the house and neighborhood are no longer mine.”

The playground, now with a fresh coat of paint, is still there. Becker hopes it’s just as magical to the next family as it was to him.

“The people who moved into my parents’ house submitted a letter saying they had a four-year-old daughter and could just envision all the Christmases and all the birthday play dates in your backyard,” he shares. “I wish I could have that house for the rest of my life, but I’m glad your kid is going to have all the same formative experiences in my house, which is now your house.”

Becker isn't holding on to the past — he’s distilling what sense of place means to him now.

“The question of ‘What is home?’ really rattled my brain because that house, that neighborhood, is home,” he says. “The 55-plus community with an HOA my parents live in now isn’t home, so what is home?”

It’s a heavy question that he’s aiming to partly answer through song, but he hasn’t landed on anything absolute yet.

“Maybe I haven’t fully found what is home,” Becker concludes. “I love Denver, but I don’t know if it’s considered home for me yet.”

Richard Becker with Lauren Frihauf, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, August 5, Two Moons, 2944 Larimer Street. Tickets are $18.