Joshua Ray Walker

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      "details": "Joshua Ray Walker\nStuff\n\nJoshua Ray Walker’s music humanizes and honors outcast characters, particularly surprising ones. Last year, during intensive chemo treatment for stage 3B colon cancer, as Walker contemplated what he might leave behind, and the way the meaning we assign to items evaporates if we’re not around to hold their memories, he started thinking about a new kind of character. As he processed his treatment and considered his worldly possessions, Walker decided to write an entire album about the inner lives of inanimate objects. Equally inspired by a childhood salvaging stuff from estate sales with his grandparents, and an upbringing colored by frugality and attention to the utility of everyday things, the resulting album, Stuff, will be released October 17 via East Dallas Records/Thirty Tigers.\n\nReckoning with cancer treatment and his own mortality, Walker also grieved a creative life — that he had more left to give — potentially cut short. Much like the items abandoned at an estate sale, he knew he too had more worth. “Both my grandparents found value in things that had life left in them,” Walker says. “At the time of writing these songs, I was really hoping that I had a second shot, some more life left in me, and I think that I projected that on a lot of these characters.”\n\nStuff begins with the title track, setting the scene and the stakes for the album: “Why wait until it’s gone / to find out what matters,” Walker sings. “Heirlooms and trinkets and pretty things/ we’re all just stuff when you’re not around / sometimes what’s lost just can’t be found.” Each track imagines the internal monologue of a household item for sale on the lawn at an estate sale: a Barbie doll, pruning shears, a radio, a trusty suit, a half-used bottle of perfume, and even a basso profundo-voiced bowling ball afraid he’s about to be benched: “checking in at the pro shop for maintenance and repairs / how many frames do I have left doc? / Do I have some time to spare?”\n\nSome items on Stuff, Walker knows personally, like the “Brick” his family kept around to prop doors open and table legs up, and to keep car tires from rolling during repair jobs. These bricks came from the neighborhood filling station — a 1940s-style full-service joint whose grizzled attendants always gave Walker a snack to munch in the back of his dad’s Chevy while they waited. The night after developers tore the station down under cover of darkness, Walker and his father returned to the rubble to steal a few bricks as keepsakes and tools. And “Perfume” is Walker’s sensuous, longing, personification of the half-empty bottles of Chanel No. 9 his grandma collected at estate sales and lined up on her vanity. She’s yet another in a long line of Walker’s signature heart broke characters, who implores, “do you still smell me on your sheets / and when you do, does your heart skip a beat?”\n\nThe world needs connection and empathy, now more than ever. Walker hopes that by relating to these inanimate characters, listeners will learn to better connect to living ones, too. “It's probably lofty to think that an album about bowling balls and Barbie dolls is going to make people think about their relationship with their neighbors or community,” he says. “But maybe subconsciously, if people can connect with these things that aren't even people, it'll make them a little better at connecting with people.”\n\nLike his June release, Tropicana, Walker wrote Stuff during cancer treatment. For him, the albums constitute two sides of the proverbial coin. Hospitals are innately devoid of creativity, utilitarian and harsh by their very nature, and Walker found himself oscillating between a gripping need to escape — say to a beach in Tropicana — and contemplating his own legacy and the Stuff in his life. And, when he was briefly misdiagnosed with stage 4 cancer (later updated to a clean scan), Walker started to push himself creatively, resolving to release three albums (of which Stuff is the second) in whatever time he had left.\n\nAt times of reflection, human beings often return to the moments that shaped them. On Stuff, Walker draws from the music he listened to as a teenager — Bon Iver, Beirut, The Postal Service, and Ben Gibbard — and nostalgic, formative moments. On “Barbie” and “Telephone” — the album’s most pop-influenced tracks — childhood and teenage memories play through two of youth’s fondest objects. On “Barbie,” disinterested in the Barbie and Ken love story, Walker reimagines Barbie as an independent woman lusting after GI Joe. And over a beat worthy of a Friday-night roller rink party, on “Telephone” Walker memorializes the landline — once a focal point of American homes and teenage years — and the source of sleepover mischief and long, covert, late-night conversations.\n\n“People put a lot of their personal opinions and meaning into art,” Walker says of the many details he included on the album. “Art isn't there for people to interpret so they can be...",
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  "long_description": "Joshua Ray Walker\nStuff\n\nJoshua Ray Walker’s music humanizes and honors outcast characters, particularly surprising ones. Last year, during intensive chemo treatment for stage 3B colon cancer, as Walker contemplated what he might leave behind, and the way the meaning we assign to items evaporates if we’re not around to hold their memories, he started thinking about a new kind of character. As he processed his treatment and considered his worldly possessions, Walker decided to write an entire album about the inner lives of inanimate objects. Equally inspired by a childhood salvaging stuff from estate sales with his grandparents, and an upbringing colored by frugality and attention to the utility of everyday things, the resulting album, Stuff, will be released October 17 via East Dallas Records/Thirty Tigers.\n\nReckoning with cancer treatment and his own mortality, Walker also grieved a creative life — that he had more left to give — potentially cut short. Much like the items abandoned at an estate sale, he knew he too had more worth. “Both my grandparents found value in things that had life left in them,” Walker says. “At the time of writing these songs, I was really hoping that I had a second shot, some more life left in me, and I think that I projected that on a lot of these characters.”\n\nStuff begins with the title track, setting the scene and the stakes for the album: “Why wait until it’s gone / to find out what matters,” Walker sings. “Heirlooms and trinkets and pretty things/ we’re all just stuff when you’re not around / sometimes what’s lost just can’t be found.” Each track imagines the internal monologue of a household item for sale on the lawn at an estate sale: a Barbie doll, pruning shears, a radio, a trusty suit, a half-used bottle of perfume, and even a basso profundo-voiced bowling ball afraid he’s about to be benched: “checking in at the pro shop for maintenance and repairs / how many frames do I have left doc? / Do I have some time to spare?”\n\nSome items on Stuff, Walker knows personally, like the “Brick” his family kept around to prop doors open and table legs up, and to keep car tires from rolling during repair jobs. These bricks came from the neighborhood filling station — a 1940s-style full-service joint whose grizzled attendants always gave Walker a snack to munch in the back of his dad’s Chevy while they waited. The night after developers tore the station down under cover of darkness, Walker and his father returned to the rubble to steal a few bricks as keepsakes and tools. And “Perfume” is Walker’s sensuous, longing, personification of the half-empty bottles of Chanel No. 9 his grandma collected at estate sales and lined up on her vanity. She’s yet another in a long line of Walker’s signature heart broke characters, who implores, “do you still smell me on your sheets / and when you do, does your heart skip a beat?”\n\nThe world needs connection and empathy, now more than ever. Walker hopes that by relating to these inanimate characters, listeners will learn to better connect to living ones, too. “It's probably lofty to think that an album about bowling balls and Barbie dolls is going to make people think about their relationship with their neighbors or community,” he says. “But maybe subconsciously, if people can connect with these things that aren't even people, it'll make them a little better at connecting with people.”\n\nLike his June release, Tropicana, Walker wrote Stuff during cancer treatment. For him, the albums constitute two sides of the proverbial coin. Hospitals are innately devoid of creativity, utilitarian and harsh by their very nature, and Walker found himself oscillating between a gripping need to escape — say to a beach in Tropicana — and contemplating his own legacy and the Stuff in his life. And, when he was briefly misdiagnosed with stage 4 cancer (later updated to a clean scan), Walker started to push himself creatively, resolving to release three albums (of which Stuff is the second) in whatever time he had left.\n\nAt times of reflection, human beings often return to the moments that shaped them. On Stuff, Walker draws from the music he listened to as a teenager — Bon Iver, Beirut, The Postal Service, and Ben Gibbard — and nostalgic, formative moments. On “Barbie” and “Telephone” — the album’s most pop-influenced tracks — childhood and teenage memories play through two of youth’s fondest objects. On “Barbie,” disinterested in the Barbie and Ken love story, Walker reimagines Barbie as an independent woman lusting after GI Joe. And over a beat worthy of a Friday-night roller rink party, on “Telephone” Walker memorializes the landline — once a focal point of American homes and teenage years — and the source of sleepover mischief and long, covert, late-night conversations.\n\n“People put a lot of their personal opinions and meaning into art,” Walker says of the many details he included on the album. “Art isn't there for people to interpret so they can be...",
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