Joshua Ray Walker Makes Peace With Death on New Album, ‘Stuff’

Joshua Ray Walker wrote the songs on his new album Stuff last fall, after doctors told him he was probably going to die.

The singer envisions Stuff as the leftover spread after an estate sale. Each passed-over item has its own song: a brick, a bowling ball, a half-empty perfume bottle and a suit are just some of the objects still out on the lawn after the bargain hunters have come and gone.

Writing their stories became an outlet for Walker during a time when he was making “dark and scary” decisions about his own estate.

“I started to think really hard about my stuff and who would have to deal with it,” he tells Taste of Country.

“It’s a really big task when someone dies, especially if they have a lot of things,” Walker adds. “It’s a person’s whole life to sort through.”

Joshua Ray Walker’s Cancer Journey

Walker’s grim cancer prognosis — followed just two months later by an update that was nothing short of miraculous — left him reeling in the fall of 2024. First came the devastating news: a test revealed that the colon cancer he’d been battling for several months had spread to his lungs, drastically lowering his chances of survival.

But almost two months later, a battery of tests and an extensive biopsy procedure proved that diagnosis incorrect, revealing no discernible cancer in his body.

The news was joyful, but it was also complicated. Walker had endured two major surgeries and two months of chemotherapy. He still felt ill, but there was an expectation — whether real or perceived — for him to bounce back immediately and return to business as usual.

Cancer isn’t a binary disease. Just because you’re not sick doesn’t mean you’re healthy. Walker won’t technically be in remission until he receives another four years of clean scans. While there’s currently no discernible cancer in his body, that doesn’t mean he’s cancer-free.

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“I think that’s been one of the hardest parts of this cancer journey, is that once I got the clean bill of health, it’s not over,” the singer says. “That just means I have a test every two months where I wonder if I have cancer or not for two weeks while I wait for the results to come back.”

Joshua Ray Walker Made Music to Cope With His Cancer Battle

While he waits, Walker has been making music. Stuff is the second in a trilogy of albums that he describes as a “weird kind of time capsule” of his cancer years. The first installment, Tropicana, arrived in June, and the third has yet to be announced.

Walker — who has synesthesia — says it was fun to anthropomorphize each item, singing from its perspective and matching it with the musical style that fit best.

You’ll hear a wide variety of sounds on Stuff, from the Springsteen-esque country rock of “Brick” to the jangling indie-pop of “Telephone” to the dizzying, genre-flipping mashup of “Radio.”

Read More: The 10 Best Joshua Ray Walker Songs

Each song on Stuff is a tender and loving portrait. Walker’s fondness for inanimate objects actually predates his cancer diagnosis; he explored it in his 2021 song “Dumpster Diving.”

That track was inspired by memories of “junking” with his grandparents as a kid — pulling trashed items out of dumpsters to refurbish, sell, or keep.

Walker doesn’t hold onto material objects the way he used to, a shift he attributes to clearing out his grandpa’s and dad’s estates after they died. He also suffered a house flood in 2020 that destroyed many old heirlooms.

Even so, he still keeps a few sentimental objects at home. He admits he was surprised that some of the most meaningful ones didn’t end up inspiring songs on Stuff.

His dad’s Abu Garcia fishing reel, the set of scales his grandpa brought back from his Navy stint in Japan, and a painted egg his grandmother used to keep in a glass case — none of those treasures ended up making it into Walker’s imagined estate sale. Their songs simply didn’t come naturally when he sat down to write them.

“But even though those items are more interesting, I feel like the idea that the items [on Stuff] were left over developed over time,” he explains. “And I don’t know if those items would have been left over. Those items might have been sold.”

How Did Joshua Ray Walker Write About His Cancer On Stuff?

Focusing only on the “leftover” items gave Walker a way to project some of his own feelings about death, obsolescence and second chances.

Both Stuff and his previous album, Tropicana, are about cancer — without being explicitly about cancer.

But while Tropicana was a burst of defiant escapism, the mood on Stuff is more somber and reflective, coming much closer to looking death in the eye.

You can hear that most obviously on “Bowling Ball,” where Walker sings, “How many frames do I got left, doc? / Do I have some time to spare?“

“For sure. That one was pretty on the nose,” Walker says with a laugh.

But many of the songs, such as “Perfume” and “Shears,” convey a sentiment of being past their heyday, but still hoping to find someone who thinks they’ve still got life left to live.

“All these songs were about items longing for a second chance, hoping there’s still some life left in them,” Walker reflects. “That they aren’t viewed as used up. I was definitely projecting onto those items, probably, while I was writing.”

We asked Walker if he thinks that most of the items on Stuff are in the “bargaining” stage of the five stages of grief.

“I think that’s a fair assessment, yeah,” he responds. “I think that’s pretty true.”

What’s Next For Joshua Ray Walker?

Most of the details about the third record in Walker’s “cancer years” trilogy are still under wraps.

But he tells Taste of Country that he actually started that project before he knew he was sick.

“During the year that I was home, we pulled it back out of the mixing process, wrote some more songs, got rid of some songs, and tried to recreate the record trying to make it more timely having to do with what was going on in my life,” the singer says.

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The album includes some spooky prophetic moments, like a song that foreshadows his illness, and another where he sings about getting sober in September — a year before he actually did get sober in the month of September.

Even some of the recording sessions for that project were hints at the turbulence that was about to unfold in Walker’s life.

“I didn’t feel well for about a year leading up to finding out I had cancer, and I remember feeling terrible during [one] recording session,” he says. “I was so tired. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I didn’t feel right.”

Walker says the meaning behind his songs is never fully clear to him until after they’re finished. In much the same way, he’s still too close to his cancer battle to fully understand its weight.

“I haven’t fully gotten to think about it too much,” he says, speaking about how this cycle of music has bridged, dovetailed and interacted with his health crisis and rare misdiagnosis.

But even though he’ll be going back for scans for the foreseeable future, and won’t be in official remission until 2029, Walker’s album trilogy is his process of documenting and processing his near-death experience — and hopefully, putting cancer in the rearview.