Joshua Ray Walker Overcame a Terminal Cancer Diagnosis to Make ‘Stuff’

Country music sure likes to talk a lot about “authenticity,” but spend a day with a country musician who isn’t really country — and who quite possibly shouldn’t even be around today — and you’ll understand what that word really means.

“It just sounds like a lot of stuff that I like,” Joshua Ray Walker says, talking about Stuff, the forthcoming concept record he wrote and recorded while in treatment for advanced cancer. “We had a moment where we went, ‘Did we go too far?’ And then immediately went, ‘For who?’”

Stuff, due out on Oct. 17, is an album made up of songs being sung by inanimate objects at an estate sale. Walker released the tone-setting title track in early August, followed by “Telephone,” an ode to the obsolete technological breakthrough that defined society for most of the 20th century. Sung in a pop-punk style, with a hook of “Don’t make me go the way of the operator,” it’s a look at the journey that awaits on Stuff. It’s Walker’s fourth album, recorded with one of his closest friends, John Pedigo, acting as producer.

Along with Tropicana, the ode to island living that Walker released in June, Stuff represents what Walker is calling “The Cancer Tapes,” which he and Pedigo recorded to take Walker’s mind off his January 2024 diagnosis of stage 3B colon cancer. The two men laid out a handful of rules: The songs had to be about inanimate objects. They could only use instruments that Pedigo had on-hand in his studio (such as a melodica and a toy reed organ). Finally, the project had to be laid down in one take.

“Tropicana was escapism and fun,” Walker tells Rolling Stone. “This one is more the songs that came from wondering, ‘Do I have to plan my own estate sale? Should I get rid of all my shit, so that when I die, people don’t have to look at it?’”

We’re sitting in Pedigo’s home studio, a few miles northeast of downtown Dallas, on an August Monday with temperatures soaring above 100 degrees, and humidity to match. Walker’s house — where he has lived nearly all his life — is less than a mile from here. A drive of 10 minutes will eventually take us to a secluded, but open-to-the-public, swimming pool where Walker, Pedigo, and a handful of local songwriters spend their Monday afternoons in heat like this. But before we get to that, Walker and Pedigo are playing back Stuff, intensely watching me take in each song as though I’m an unwitting participant in a viral reaction video.

By the time we hear the final track, the hard-country tune “Home,” we’ve been on a musical odyssey through pop, psychedelic punk, garage rock, and coffee shop. “Radio” lets us experience a handful of genres within the same song; Walker and Pedigo structured the melody to mimic the sounds of flipping an old-fashioned radio dial. “That’s the weird one,” Walker deadpans. He has been dialed in to my double-takes, laughs, and wide-eyed nods, but it’s apparent that he’s not interested in my reaction because he’s showing off his musical range. He’s interested because he’s showing off who he is.

Stuff marks a departure from Walker’s albums — Wish You Were Here (2019), Glad You Made It (2020), and See You Next Time (2021) — that placed listeners squarely inside honky-tonks and Texas dance halls.

“When I put out my first three records, I had always wanted to put out a honky-tonk record,” Walker says, “but I never had the budget to do it — to get the right players and make it sound right. And then, it came out, and people are like, ‘You’re a honky-tonk guy!’ And, well, yes, I love that stuff, but I like other stuff too.

“This is the first time that no one is telling me what anything has to sound like.”

Pedigo interrupts to point out that even the records that got Walker labeled as a traditional country singer had more depth to their sounds than such a label affords him.

“It’s you singing the songs,” Pedigo tells Walker, “but for the stoners, with headphones, there’s a lot of little nuggets in there.”

The sounds reflect the life Walker, now 34, had built for himself by the end of 2023 in this neighborhood on the eastern side of Dallas. Within a mile of his house, Walker has his preferred coffee shop and a Tex-Mex joint, El Vicino, that he swears by. The American Pawn where he bought his first guitar — a blue Epiphone Les Paul — is a short drive or long walk from his front door.

This is where he’d retreat after a tour ended or after a record was finished. Walker prefers to keep his music at arm’s length from his home life, although he is emphatic that he has a happy one.

So, when Walker spent all of 2023 “feeling like shit,” he chalked it up to road weariness.

“I was wondering if that’s what turning 30 was all about — just years of being on the road and not taking care of myself,” Walker says.

In early 2022, a friend and mentor to Walker, Trey Johnson, died. Johnson was a local musician and co-founder of State Fair Records, the label that released most of Walker’s music. Walker, who had already lost his father, referred to Johnson as a “father figure” after he passed. A day after Johnson’s death, Walker made his debut on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, singing “Sexy After Dark,” and then he hit the road on a grueling tour. Anxiety started piling up.

“I’ve always been a very anxious person, and that was one of the most high-stress times in my life,” Walker says. “From February of ’22 through September of ’23 was really stressful, and it was also the most successful I’ve ever been. I thought it was just pressure and stress.

“It turns out, I was developing cancer and didn’t know it.”

In the midst of it, Walker thought this was just what happens when an anxious person deals with fame. He started having heart palpitations in the van. He saw a doctor, who told him he was genetically disposed to such fluttering, but he’d likely never been stressed enough to notice it. Still, he began taking his health seriously, cutting back on drinking and dropping 110 pounds. Then, in September 2023, he learned what was actually going on. He’d been correct to pay attention to his body, but wrong about the cause. He had colon cancer. Despite its advanced stage, colon cancer at that point is highly treatable. Walker went through six months of chemotherapy and a major abdominal surgery.

He put life and career on hold, with one exception. He picked up regular shows at the Kessler Theater in Dallas. They were out of necessity.

“I knew I needed to make money,” Walker says. “We canceled shows and the tap turned off, and now I’m gig-to-gig. How can I keep enough money coming in? I still went into debt on the business side, but I was able to have enough cash flow coming in to keep my lights on and not lose my house.

“The Kessler gave me a favorable split and let me play there every month. That gave me something to look forward to on the calendar. It gave me a place to try out some new material. I got to do crowd work as a solo act, which I hadn’t done in a long time. I remembered how much I liked doing that. Those shows were a lot like when I go to Europe, and I can tell stories. Everybody was really listening.”

Edwin Cabaniss, who oversees the Kessler, Longhorn Ballroom, and a handful of other venues in Dallas, said hosting Walker was never a question.

“We knew the shows would help him financially and emotionally, so of course we said yes to hosting,” Cabaniss tells Rolling Stone. “What we didn’t expect was how therapeutic those shows would be for the rest of us. When we agreed to the series, we knew we were about to take part in one of his well-known sad songs, but in real life.”

At the end of his treatment, he had a follow-up abdominal scan. This one revealed fresh cause for concern, and a much more grim prognosis.

“I got that scan back, and I had these spots all over three quarters of my lungs,” Walker recalls. “My oncologist showed it to a lot of her peers. Without even getting a biopsy, they were positive that it was colon cancer that had metastasized, because that’s exactly what it looked like. None of those oncologists even gave it a second thought. I even have a letter from them, because I wanted one for insurance and canceling shows — I had already started to plan out the end of that year. The letter says, ‘You have stage four cancer.’ I asked about the odds. They’re about a 50 percent chance of dying in two years, and an 80 percent chance of dying in five years.

“And, I lived thinking that was my prognosis for two months.”

Throughout his treatment, Walker had made regular updates on social media, generally revealing a positive outlook and a fighting spirit. On Sept. 10, 2024, however, he put up a heartbreaking post on his Instagram page, revealing the new diagnosis, and setting up crowdfunding for his treatments. That was followed nearly immediately by another surgery, and more recovery time.

It was then that Walker found out first-hand that, on occasion, a diagnosis can be wrong.

“I had to get a biopsy of the nodes in my lungs, so they could decide what sort of treatment I was going to get,” he says. “While they were in there doing surgery, they were testing these nodules in real time, and they couldn’t get a positive result for cancer. So, they kept taking out more tissue. I had three laparoscopic holes. They pulled out the robot arms. My whole left side was like Swiss cheese. But they just could not get a positive result from any of the large nodules they took out.

“Eventually, my surgeon just had to bring me out of surgery and say, ‘Well, the bad news is, you just had a really invasive lung biopsy that’s gonna take a while to recover from, and you didn’t really need to. The good news is, we couldn’t find any cancer.”

Walker had to wait for weeks while doctors figured out the cause of those nodes. They tested him for a series of possible diseases, fungi, and other ailments. They concluded the nodes were an anomaly. “Basically, my immune system was overreacting because of the chemo,” Walker explains.

The odds of an anomaly that looks like colon cancer on a scan are long ones, but this was a jackpot Walker did not mind hitting. He and his doctors still have yet to fully understand his autoimmune issues, and there will be a series of specialist trips in his future. But it’s also not stage four cancer. After a long recovery, he started adding shows again. Once he sustained those, he began releasing music again.

In his East Dallas neighborhood, Walker has a storage unit in the same building that once housed a Mexican market where he got his first fake ID. His mom had grown tired of taking him to shows in Dallas’s Deep Ellum neighborhood when he was roughly 14. That fake ID enabled Walker to spend his teen years as an EDM kid. By age 18, he had a job working the door at Purgatory, a nightclub consisting of three different levels — one heaven, one hell, and one purgatory.

This is where he met Pedigo, a respected local musician whose production credits include Old 97’s and Vandoliers.

Pedigo happened to be in a lot of the bands that Walker would sneak in to see with that fake ID. The first was Slick 57, a group Walker happened upon when it picked up a weekly residency at Adair’s Saloon. When Walker was 21, Pedigo played in a group called the O’s. Walker was also a band member by that point, playing guitar in Ottoman Turks, and Walker’s band opened for the O’s. Pedigo invited Walker to hang out after a show, and the two became friends.

While in the throes of treatment, Pedigo was his outlet. Walker would get chemo on a Wednesday and spend Thursday at Pedigo’s house. They played the video game Rocket League a lot. Walker would alternate between napping on Pedigo’s couch and watching him work on albums. Eventually, they decided to start creating music themselves.

“We had to do something,” Pedigo recalls, “because we weren’t getting any better at Rocket League.”

That something ultimately became Tropicana and Stuff.

Walker kicks off an extended run opening for Molly Tuttle in late September. He says Tropicana will be heavy in setlists through the end of the year, at which point he will incorporate the bulk of Stuff into his shows.

He is aware of the current gatekeeping efforts in country music — whether in good faith or otherwise. He also expects to follow Stuff with a record more in line with the honky-tonk sounds he broke through playing.

“I’m just trying to shake things up before giving people what they want again,” he says.

That said, he has zero interest in joining the ongoing turf war over what is or is not “authentic” in country music.

“I have no control over how someone uses a genre name to market something,” Walker says. “I set out to make country music. It’s my version of country music. It’s influenced by music that I think is country music. So, it doesn’t matter if Jelly Roll and Beyoncé are country music now. Them being country does not make me less country.”

Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose latest books, Never Say Never and Red Dirt Unplugged are available via Back Lounge Publishing.