We recently reviewed Joshua Ray Walker’s new female-only covers album, ‘What is it Even?’, which you can read here if you missed it the first time time. This sent us down a rabbit hole in discovering Walker’s previous three albums and the praise was strong. Joshua Ray Walker has been called “country’s most fascinating young songwriter” by Rolling Stone and “one of country’s most exciting storytellers” by Spin. After releasing his first three albums, a trilogy of sorts that No Depression calls “the country music equivalent of the great American novel,” he is definitely having some fun on ‘What is it Even?’. We sat down with him at the Long Road festival, deep in the heart of the UK, to talk to him all about it.
Thank you for your time today, it’s great to speak to you. Is this your first time in the UK?
Yes. I ate some breakfast in Heathrow airport in 2019 but this is the first time I have left an airport on English soil! I’m doing this show and then hopping over to the Netherlands and Germany for a few days before returning here for a whole weeks worth of headline shows in places like London, Newcastle and Glasgow. The crowd on the Front Porch earlier today were lovely, pretty quiet and very attentive.
I’m loving the ‘What is it Even?’ album. Can you expand on what the title of that album means to you?
It’s a long story but since I was younger, since I was an adolescent, I’ve been confused for a woman multiple times. I have soft features and pretty long hair and so growing up in Texas as a male who identifies as a man it was something I felt very self conscious about. When you are growing up in a place like that and you want to be identified as masculine it’s tough when people don’t do that.
It bothered me and I think I subconsciously overcompensated for it as a teenager……………
Were you a rowdy teenager then? Did you get into trouble?
Yeah I did. I got into trouble. I got kicked out of some schools for fighting but more than just the trouble, what I felt was that I couldn’t really be who I was at that point in my life. Fast forward to a few years ago I’m singing the national anthem at the Formula 1 race in Austin, Texas. There were 450,000 people there in person and a worldwide TV audience of over 90 million, so it was a big deal! It was my first really big event but no-one had any context for who I was. We went really over the top with it: there were eagles, guys jumping out of planes, Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders and explosions – all that stuff, right?
I kept to a pretty traditional version of the national anthem although there were a couple of yodels. I was expecting some backlash on the internet because every time you do something that big on the international stage there are going to be mean comments made online, that’s just part of being in the public eye. What I wasn’t expecting was for there to be so many people complaining about the ‘woke’ status of America in that they would let a trans women sing the anthem! The next day, the trans community came to my defence and all of a sudden there were comments from both sides! I’m glad that I was 30 and had the resilience and self-esteem to not be effected by it because something like that can be very damaging to your mental health.
The new record is called ‘What is it Even?’ because the worst comment I saw came on a Youtube video where one guy said ‘What is it, even?’ about me and I decided to re-purpose the comment by naming the record that and really leaning into the visuals of it. It’s not a bit I’m doing, I do have a larger-than-life fashion style but I wanted to reclaim the comment and be very public about it as a kind of middle finger to it.
Was ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ the catalyst for the whole project and how did that come about?
I had tossed a few ideas around for a new record and there was a particular drum beat I had been trying to get my drummer to play on our records for a while but it had never really fit into anything. We were sat on the patio of a bar we were playing one day and he jokingly began to play the beat from ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ and I got excited about it. We talked about other songs that would fit onto the project and that was the catalyst for us moving forward.
The choices of covers on the album are great. Were there any songs you recorded from other female artists that didn’t make the cut?
Yeah, there was a Shania Twain one that didn’t make the cut and there were probably about 50 tracks that we played and fleshed out with the band that were up for consideration. We then worked out which ones sounded the most appropriate, which ones I couldn’t get the right key for (laughing) and things like that. We wanted to do the song justice but we also needed to sound good as a band, right?
A song like ‘Halo’ was re-purposed to fit my style, that was the kind of the goal of the project. I love arranging songs and I also wanted to push myself vocally too. I didn’t really think of myself as a singer, even after we released our first album, I thought I was a songwriter who had to sing so that we could release a record. With every record I’ve pushed myself a little further but this new one was a pretty big jump forward – trying to cover Beyonce and Whitney Houston – and whilst I’m never going to sing the songs as good as they did I wanted to have fun and see if I could pull it off.
Of all the Dolly Paton songs, what drew you to ‘Joshua’, aside from the matching name of the song to yours!
I’ve always really liked that song and I wasn’t going to go for one of the ‘big’ Dolly songs because they have all been covered a million times already by people and artists who could do them better than I could. I always liked the song ‘Joshua’ and I’m pretty sure it was released on my birthday too! It might need fact-checking but I believe it was, 20 years before I was born. The storyline is intriguing too.
I think my favourite of your first three albums would be ‘See You Next Time’. Do you have a favourite or is that like asking you to choose between your children?
The project was designed as a trilogy so I think of all three albums as one piece of work. The first album is so special because I had waited 10 years to make my first record and so there was a lot of time and effort that went into that first record. The third record, I feel like, has a lot more of my personalty in it. I feel like you can really hear my confidence grow throughout the three records, although a lot of the songs on ‘See You Next Time’ were written even before the first album came out.
I conceptualised the trilogy back in 2015 but didn’t record the first album until 2019 although I knew what all three were going to be about. I knew what the titles were, the artwork and all that but I didn’t want to tell anybody that it was a trilogy back then in 2019 because a new guy, coming out of the gate, would have scared people with his grand ideas given a lot of people don’t like concept albums anyway! (laughing) ‘I’m here, I’m new and I’ve got a three album concept trilogy on the way,’ right? (laughing)
What’s your next album going to be like then? Is it going to be stand alone album, another ambitious concept project? What can you tell us?
I’m working on the next trilogy but it isn’t going to be my next release. It is going to take me a while to finish it. There are a couple of records I want to make in the meantime. Nothing official yet but there will be some new music coming from me next year.
Grab tickets to see Joshua Ray Walker’s UK shows in September right here.
