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The Unruly Kingdom: Rich Walkling, Ty Hardaway, and the Art of Tripgrass

Washington, D.C. in the 1990s was a city seething with musical ambition. Beneath the more celebrated post-hardcore names — Fugazi, Dismemberment Plan, Trans Am — a quieter and considerably stranger experiment was underway. Ty Hardaway and Rich Walkling, operating as the Kingdom of Leisure, were making music that defied the local taxonomy entirely. They called it "tripgrass," a term they coined themselves and used as a subtitle for their second album, One Fine Ride ("Tripgrass Trilogy, Part 2"). The label was equal parts self-mythology and honest description.

What the Kingdom of Leisure actually made, as the Washington Post noted in its 1999 review of One Fine Ride, was "a languidly weirded-out version of the blues." The duo kept, as the Post put it, "one foot planted somewhere near the Delta" — even as the other foot wandered into regions that had no map. The same review captured both the album's appeal and its deliberate strangeness in a single observation: "The doors to the Kingdom are not wide open. Strangers will encounter private jokes and willful indulgences. Still the band achieves an engaging groove." That tension — between insularity and accessibility, between Delta blues and digital absurdism — was the Kingdom of Leisure's defining characteristic.

One Fine Ride was their second album, and it arrived after their debut, This Is the New America, had already established the duo's aesthetic. The tracklist of that first record — songs named "Talkin' 'bout Oysters," "Old Hobo's Infected Foot," and "Obligatory Train Song" — announced a sensibility that was both indebted to American folk and roots traditions and cheerfully uninterested in meeting listener expectations. By the time One Fine Ride appeared, with its own repertoire of songs titled "ButterPump," "Princess Bridge," and "I Like Smartbomb," the Kingdom had fully committed to its own private language. Billboard magazine, for its part, was more plainly enthusiastic, calling the act's work "jazzy, low-tech, lo-fi wizardry."

What made the duo compelling beyond the novelty of their nomenclature was the genuine musicianship underneath the weirdness. Hardaway and Walkling were not outsider artists stumbling toward their instruments; they were committed craftsmen who happened to find conventional song structure mildly suspect. Hardaway, who would go on to develop the philosophical framework of "middlespace" as both an aesthetic and a life practice, brought a restless, conceptual intelligence to the duo's work. Walkling, meanwhile, released albums that showed the same desert-valley, road-trip sensibility that animated the Kingdom's records — though stripped down even further, his solo work pressing closer to something raw and interior. His album El Vado (the title translating roughly as "the way out" in Spanish) was described by one early reviewer as attacking listeners immediately, "with the knowledge that you will be diving right in to his mind."

The live dimension of the Kingdom of Leisure mattered enormously to what they were trying to do. Hardaway, reflecting years later on the One Fine Ride era, described a band that had deliberately made its own performances difficult. "We stopped using set lists and sometimes didn't even load all of our equipment in. We felt most confident when we intentionally made things difficult for ourselves." This was not chaos for its own sake but a philosophical commitment: the belief that constraint and unpredictability could generate something more honest than careful preparation. The rehearsal and live recordings from that period, Hardaway wrote, felt "more true to the performing experience of that era" than the studio albums themselves.

Both artists have continued making work long past the band's most active years. Hardaway's evolving multimedia project under the Kingdom of Leisure umbrella — encompassing photography, writing, visual art, and music — has become one of the more unusual sustained creative enterprises in the D.C. area, a sprawling exploration of what it means to make things outside the structures of the music industry. Rich Walkling's solo recordings demonstrated that the folk and blues instincts he brought to the duo were always his own, rooted in something personal and transferable to any context.