(MPG) Joshua Ray Walker announced his new album Stuff alongside the release of the title track. The 10-song collection will be released on October 17 via East Dallas Records / Thirty Tigers and marks Walker's most ambitious concept album to date as he inhabits the inner lives of inanimate objects, writing each song from the perspective of an item at an estate sale.
Arriving just months after the surprise release of his acclaimed beach-country album Tropicana, Stuff is a major stylistic shift for Walker as he explores stripped-down, experimental indie-folk and Americana, drawing inspiration from the indie music he listened to as a teenager like Bon Iver, Beirut, and The Postal Service.
The album opener "Stuff" sets the scene and the stakes for the album: "Why wait until it's gone / To find out what matters / Sold out on the lawn worn well but not tattered / We're what gets left behind / Under dust is where you'll find me / Out of sight but you must mind / Like someone else's trophies." About the song, Walker explains: "This song is a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and an introduction to my most ambitious concept record to date. I hope people will connect with it even though it's just about 'stuff.'"
Like his June release, Tropicana, Walker wrote Stuff during intensive chemo treatment for stage 3B colon cancer. 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 to contemplate his own legacy and the Stuff in his life. When he was briefly misdiagnosed with stage 4 cancer, which was 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.
Reckoning with cancer treatment and his own mortality, Walker grieved his creative life that could potentially be 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."
To make the album, Walker and long-time producer and friend John Pedigo locked themselves in Pedigo's backyard studio for a week. The pair set strict ground rules: everything on the album had to be found in the studio, and the pair would play all the instruments, many of which have never been used before on any of his records- including toy reed organs, synthesizers, banjolele, melodica, and other found objects used for auxiliary percussion.
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."
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]