“I've Been Fulfilling This Timeline That I Made For Myself When I Thought I Was Going To Die:” Joshua Ray Walker on Purpose, Legacy and the Second Chances of Stuff

Glittering crystal and aging brass. Old car parts and oxidized tools.

Joshua Ray Walker recalls the items his grandparents would bring home from estate sales. For his grandmother, it was fine ceramics and letter openers, gravitating toward items that could be flipped and sold for profit. For his grandfather, it was VCRs, lawn mowers, coils of discarded rope, the broken things that could be fixed and made anew.

The ‘Voices’ artist remembers these secondhand wares as a way his family often made ends meet, but it wasn’t until after their deaths that he became even better acquainted with their possessions.

“I was really hands on, going through their stuff when they passed,” the singer-songwriter shares with Holler during a moment of respite from this year’s AmericanaFest activities. The mid-afternoon sun warms his East Nashville hotel room as he speaks of Stuff, his latest album and second full-length release of 2025. “It took years, and it really gave me a lot of perspective about physical belongings.”

As he explains, “After they died, I was way more thoughtful about what I held on to. I didn't want to be someone who held on to a lot of things unnecessarily. Although it was beautiful how much purpose they found in these things, I personally just didn't want to have a lot.”

This sentiment followed Walker, especially, as he embarked on the road as a touring musician. It kept him traveling light for years, with little more than a change of socks and a toothbrush as his barest necessities. Eventually, though, the purchase of a house, the desire to nest and make a home and that cursed pull of nostalgia crept in, reshaping his relationship with things.

In September 2023, however, those feelings resurfaced once again. Walker was diagnosed with advanced stage colon cancer, and his own potential estate planning began to stare back at him.

“I knew it was a possibility that I would have to have an estate sale, and I was thinking about all that stuff that gets left over,” he shares. “People come and they pick through the good stuff, but there's always an old baseball trophy, and a bowling ball, and some half used toiletries, and just like weird stuff that gets left at the end of an estate sale.”

That’s how Stuff was born, an album made up of those leftover bits.

Across ten tracks, Walker inhabits a Barbie, a telephone, a pair of shears and more, sharing the perspective of these inanimate objects. Where Walker’s June release, Tropicana, offered the artist a breezy, beachy getaway while undergoing treatment, Stuff forced him to sit in what he was going through as he ruminated on not just his worldly possessions but the legacy he would also leave behind.

“Tropicana was all about escapism and fun, imagining being somewhere else,” he says. “Stuff is fully living in what I was going through and using these objects to write about purpose and legacy and second chances and all the stuff that I was thinking about while I was going through treatment.”

Walker lived for a couple of months believing he had Stage 4 cancer–the illness was thought to have migrated to his lungs–and just a handful of years to live. If the diagnosis proved terminal, he wanted to spend what time he had left doing what he loves: making albums.

“That's why we went so hard this year, and why I'm putting out so many records,” he explains. “This whole last year, I've been fulfilling this timeline that I made for myself when I thought I was going to die.”

His metastatic cancer, however, was thankfully misdiagnosed. Yet, he and his producer stuck to their plan anyway, leading to his last two albums and more still on the way. Of his recent work, he shares, “I thought these were going to be, potentially, the last records I get to make. It's really weird to be putting them out and to be healthy now.”

Weird, sure. But he says this whole journey has also been a blessing, full of silver linings, adding, “It's the most creative I've ever been. It's the most prolific I've ever been writing and recording. I've spent a lot of time with my mom and fiancé, and I have a lot of perspective on life that I didn't have before."

In addition to discussing his newest release, Joshua Ray Walker touched on his songcraft, how he finds inspiration in the mundane and his biggest takeaways from the last year:

“I had the idea of writing a song from the perspective of an inanimate object, I think, on tour, shortly before I got sick. For some reason, I was thinking about a brick: the life that a brick has, how long it's there, the uses it has, the craftsmanship that goes into laying brick, making a brick.

I tend to mentally kind of go down long rabbit holes that other people would probably find boring. My daydreams are kind of mundane.

That seed was planted, and then I got sick, and the idea just kind of kept popping up. I would randomly write the objects in a thumb note just keeping track of different potential things.

I also have always kind of given things a personality… I just assign human characteristics to lots of stuff: random objects, vehicles, buildings, characters like numbers and letters. So it was easy for me to kind of personify the objects on the record.”

“Another huge blessing was that I got to make an inventory of my life and think, ‘What would I change about what I'm doing right now to be more fulfilled or happy or whatever?’ I had very little I needed to change to live the life that I most wanted to have.

That was such a huge relief to realize that, because you don't really know until you have to know. I spent so much of my life thinking I was unhappy, and then to realize that it was all right there.

It's really simple. It was just spend more time with people that you enjoy, doing things you enjoy, which seems like such an obvious thing to do, but I just feel like it's really easy in life to grit your teeth and be like, ‘I'm gonna get through this, and then at the end, there's gonna be a payoff.’

I don't know if I would have realized how close I was to having a life I wanted if I hadn't gotten sick.”

“I don't think [cancer] will affect the sound of my records, because that's been always changing anyway, and I want it to keep changing. It might affect the process, like I just make records exactly how I want to make them now. I'm really grateful that I get to do that and that I have people who want to put them out and people who want to listen to them.

It affects the way I work. I'm definitely working smarter instead of harder these days… You can feel like you're kind of banging your head against the wall sometimes, and this has given me the clarity, when I'm feeling that way, to just go ‘Eh, whatever’. We’ll pivot, and then it'll work or it won't.

I've been very lucky that I don't have a lot of ego wrapped up in this, and so when something doesn't work, I’m kind of like, ‘Okay, well, what can I do to get from point A to point B?’ Then, we'll make a new plan. I feel like that's the only reason I'm still in the game. The only way you fail at this is by quitting.”

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