Issue #25: JOSHUA RAY WALKER

The Dallas singer-songwriter gets deep.

If you like good songs and twangy, deep-felt country music and you haven’t listened to Joshua Ray Walker — well, you’re a little late but you can still hop on the bandwagon before he becomes a superstar. Every time I leave Dallas these days, I find myself wanting to listen to Josh, who grew up and still lives in the city. His music is so of the city but also, of course, universal in the way that most actually specific things are.

Almost a year ago (unbelievably) he spent a month playing every Tuesday at Double Wide, a divey Dallas stalwart (if you go, you gotta get a Yoohoo Yeehaw — rules are rules), to work out new material and refine his live set. Jonny and I went to three out of the four shows, bringing different friends each time. They were phenomenal, and not only for the enthusiastic hometown crowd — Josh’s voice will astound you live, and that is a guarantee (I have spent much of the past couple years trying to convince people to go see him when he’s in their city, and I basically never do that). Every person we brought walked out sold, and having had an extremely fun time to boot (try not to dance along to “True Love” or “Fossil Fuel”).

Anyway! Josh joined the Official Don’t Rock The Inbox Zoom Room earlier this month to talk about his latest album What Is It Even? among other things; if you’re a paying subscriber, you can listen to the entire thing via our podcast here. Enjoy, and go listen to him!!

— Natalie

Natalie: Can you tell us a little more about why the record is called What Is It Even?

Walker: I was singing the National Anthem at the Formula One race in Austin a couple years ago. The viewer base I think is was like over 90 million people, with a ton of international viewers. It was definitely the first time that I had been put on an international stage — where people have absolutely no context for not just who I am but even what country music is, especially the type of country music that I play...There's like bald eagles and fireworks and military helicopters... So it's like that, and then me in a floral embroidered suit with what I call Baja Blast colored hair in a mullet. I yodeled one of the notes. To an international viewer, you're just like, What the fuck is happening?

I was expecting a good amount of hate online, because anytime you do anything on any stage that size, there's going to be just a ton of vitriol and hate no matter how good it is or who you are. But what I wasn't really prepared for was there was a growing number of people on Twitter and in some YouTube comments [the original video has since been deleted] who were very upset at how woke the performance was because they had let a trans woman sing the National Anthem.

I was expecting fat jokes or whatever, but there were a lot of transphobic comments. And for the record, I'm a cisgendered hetero male. So I was like, "Well, this isn't really my battle, I'm not gonna like argue my genitals on the internet. It's not my place, I'm not part of the community." But then the next day, a bunch of people in the trans community started defending me in the comments and I was like, "Okay, now I have to say something." So I was like, "Thanks for your support. Not part of the community, but I am an ally....I don't know what to say."

My favorite comment was this one French guy on the YouTube comment section who just said, "What is it even?" I just thought that was really funny. It made me laugh and I told my band about it, and then it became like a running joke on the road. Like, "What is it even?" "Fuggedaboutit," that sort of thing.

I guess the deeper story and how it ties into the record is that I've been misgendered since junior high, probably. I grew my hair out when I was like 13 and started getting called "Ma'am" at restaurants and it just kind of continued. I have soft features. It didn't help that I like wearing flamboyant stuff and I have long pretty hair. People thought I was a woman. That happened to me through my adolescence, and then it stopped happening as much. But as a young person, it caused a lot of stress for me, because I came from a conservative family. It just caused this thing where I think I felt like I needed to be more masculine. I do identify as a man, and I was an adolescent boy trying to age into a man. When I was growing up, that was a reason for self-doubt and self-consciousness. But as I aged into my 20s, my idea of what gender should be changed and my confidence grew, and over time, I just stopped thinking about it and also didn't care. If I'm misgendered, who cares?

Making this record, calling it What Is It Even?, really leaning into stereotypical feminine tropes for the visuals and stuff, I guess was my attempt at reclaiming my part of the conversation about my gender and just really making a statement that I don't care anymore — while also trying to be sensitive to the fact that there is a huge debate over gender in the U.S. right now. My story is not the important debate that's happening right now. Me being gendered properly as a cis male doesn't hold the same weight as someone who is transitioning and deserves their equality. Trying to talk about it while also not taking focus away from the actual issue at hand.

Natalie: What has it been like for you to broach some of those more corporate country spaces — coming from Dallas and being in like Music Row writers rooms?

Walker: I didn't even know people co-wrote songs, basically until I was making the first record and I went on a trip with my producer to Nashville, and he got me in my first writing rooms. I was terrified, because I write really slow. The idea is you show up and crank out a whole song in three or four hours. Once I started doing it, I really started to enjoy it. It's like working out a muscle — it's helped me a lot writing for myself, because it is hard to sit still and finish a song but it's something I can do now from practice writing with other people there. Even if you get in a room and you write something that's not good, you went through the process of doing it. Something you write in the future will probably be better.

I've really appreciated that songwriting scene for what it is, but there are times when I'm really outside my comfort zone. I've done sessions where I wasn't allowed to, like, bring an acoustic guitar. You're writing for someone who's doing a pop track and the producers are making the track in real time. You just write over this repetitive track. But I try to take kind of any and all co-writes, because somebody's going to teach you something. You're going to pick up something from somebody in the room that you didn't know before or had never thought of that way.

Nashville is definitely like, a different scene than Texas. But what I really appreciate about it is that even though there's a ton of sheen, glitz, and glamour, at the heart of that community, pretty much everyone respects the art of a good song. Whether it's your cup of tea or not, what ends up on country radio — I've heard those songs played stripped down with an acoustic guitar, sung by somebody who's really talented, and gone like, "Oh, that's a good song." The finished product might not always be something you want to listen to. But there's at least one line in each one of the songs that will stick with you, where it's good enough that you finish the whole song, because that one line is so sticky. That line has to exist in a song, and you'll write a whole song around it just to make sure that one line exists.

The first place I ever played in Nashville was a writer's round at the Tin Roof. I totally embarrassed myself. The only rule is you can't do covers, and I was like, cool. I didn't play a cover. That's not where the story is going.

It was during AmericanaFest — I also didn't know what AmericanaFest was — I booked a solo tour for myself, and I came to Nashville a couple days early because I had had a show cancelled in Ohio or something. I knew like two or three people in Nashville, and I went out and went to a bar called Dee's and like, shot dice and had a great time on a Monday. They were like, "You should go to the Tin Roof tomorrow. One of our friends is playing and it's a writer's round." I didn't know what that was either.

Then I got there and I was like, "Oh, it's a song swap." That's what we call it in Texas. I was standing there and this guy was playing "Diamond Rings and Old Barstools." As far as pop country songs go, one of the better one — and I was like "Man, he's really good, but we're not supposed to play covers." So I leaned over to the guy next to me, and I'm like, "Hey, we're not supposed to play covers, right?" And he kind of looked at me and was like, "Yeah — he wrote that." I was like, "Oooooh." Then it turned out the guy that I'd leaned over and whispered that to was Brent Cobb. So I double embarrassed myself.

If the guy who wrote that lived in Dallas, he wouldn't be out at a bar doing a song swap. He'd be playing around a golf somewhere. So I guess that's what I mean by the culture of respecting the song — there's still a magic to a good song. Like, it doesn't matter what you've done in your career. It's like, if you've written one good song and it was successful, you've kind of earned the respect of the of the scene. And there's something to be said for that — I mean, that's what we're all trying to do is write a good song.