Joshua Ray Walker - Stuff (2025) Hi-Res

There’s a saying, often attributed to the late talk show host Bruce Williams, along the lines of, “Never love anything that can’t love you back.” In other words, love only people (and maybe dogs). But what about the other things we love – cars, clothes, places, homes, and especially (yes) music? It seems natural (to me, anyway) to love things that bring us happiness or sustain memories. And, on his latest album, Joshua Ray Walker posits that those “things,” in their own way, love us back. Stuff (brilliant title, considering the conceit) has the singer-songwriter voicing the perspectives of various objects at an estate sale. Once you wrap your head around the concept, Walker’s adept songwriting reminds you that “stuff” like a suit, a telephone, or even an entire house are extensions of us, and they all tell pieces of our stories.

Walker came upon the idea for these songs while undergoing treatments for colon cancer (full disclosure – I went through the same situation a few years before he did). He felt that he, like many of the discarded objects, still had value. He begins Stuff with the title song, an acoustic ballad that lays out the estate sale in whole, full of objects seeking a new home, and a new life – “We’re all more than where we’ve been, it just takes some adjusting.” Walker’s songs pace through the sale, coming upon other cast-offs – a brick, a Barbie doll – before finding “Perfume,” a half-empty bottle that reminds the singer of the ones that his grandmother collected, triggering a sense memory – “I turned some heads back in my day/Some say a little goes a long way/You’ll know a lot of me before I fade away.”

Part of Walker’s attachment to not-so-gently used objects comes from, as a child, scavenging through estate sales with his grandparents (finding objects like those perfume bottles). That “waste not, want not” ethos extends to the production of Stuff, in which he and co-producer John Pedigo pledged to use only instruments and objects found in Pedigo’s studio (and, for good measure, played only by the two men). This includes the chunky bass line on “Bowling Ball,” matching Walker’s exaggerated deep voice. “Radio (Cuchiarella, Banjo, Magic Set)” features the sounds of an old-time radio static-surfing across stations, styles and objects, as well as making time for the origin story of that banjo – “Stolen from coasts that were lined with gold/Set off on ships where my friends were all sold.” And “Telephone” features a rarely-heard busy signal from an old-school corded phone that clings to the conversations it once carried – “Tone deaf lovers under the covers who’ll never hang up/For hours and hours we spoke mouth to mouth.” The album wraps with a wider view of the empty estate as a whole. “Home” is the most country-ish song on the record, featuring harmonica and a plaintive acoustic solo, as the house mourns its empty halls – “Evil is a name of a foreman as I live alone/My arteries are empty now that you’ve all moved on.” That seemingly inanimate object knows that its value comes from its sheltering of living, breathing beings – a reminder that we’re all worth something to someone.