Scott Walker (born Noel Scott Engel; January 9, 1943) is an American-born British singer-songwriter, composer and record producer. He is noted for his distinctive baritone voice and for the unorthodox career path which has taken him from 1960s pop icon to 21st century avant-garde musician.
Originally coming to fame in the mid-1960s singing orchestral pop ballads as the frontman of The Walker Brothers, Walker went on to a solo career balancing a light entertainment/MOR ballad approach with increasing artistic innovations in arrangement and writing perspective. Despite a series of acclaimed albums, a disastrous drop in sales forced him back into straight Middle of the road recordings with little of his own artistic input. This in turn eventually led to a Walker Brothers reunion in the mid-1970s (although the latter eventually moved, by mutual consent, into more avant-garde areas).
Since the mid-1980s Walker has revived his solo career while drastically reinventing his artistic and compositional methods, via a series of acclaimed and vividly avant-garde albums. These combine his iconic singing voice with an unsettling avant-garde approach owing more to modernist and post-modernist classical composition than it does to his pop singer past. The change in approach has been compared to "Andy Williams reinventing himself as Stockhausen".