The title sounds like defiance now. But when Joshua Ray Walker began writing Ain’t Dead Yet, his sixth studio album, he did not yet know just how close to the bone that phrase would cut.
The record was written before the cancer diagnosis that would rearrange, and threaten, his life. Walker now, thankfully, has a clean bill of health, but the shadow was there before anyone had put a name to it. In the press pack, he says: “That whole year I just felt awful and like I was dying. I didn’t feel right, and mentally I was off, like there really was something wrong the whole time.”
That, perhaps, explains why these songs feel like they are carrying more than their share. They are not crushed by it, though. If anything, Walker seems to have gone back to an older sound, as if instinctively reaching for something rooted, weathered and true.
The title track proves he remains a Renaissance man, but one with both boots planted in old-time country. There is a lived-in quality here, a feeling that nothing is being dressed up for modern tastes. It is country music in the classic sense: stories, scars, steel guitar and survival.
“Shoot Me Straight” adds horns, heads off to the honky tonk and positively seems to relish the break-up. Given what Walker has been through, surely he is entitled to a little reflection too, and when he offers, “memory lane is a freeway now,” it lands like one of those lines that sounds simple until it floors you.
Elsewhere, the record leans fully into tradition. With a name like “Classic Country Song,” what else could it be? One of the singles, “Capital Letters,” feels haunted by its harmonies and steel guitar, especially as Walker sings that “it’s a cruel, cruel world.” He sounds like a man who knows that, but refuses to let it have the final word.
What you might call the “classic” sound is all over the album, but the band really excels on “Texas Sober,” where everything feels loose, warm and entirely natural. “Blue Genes,” meanwhile, laments the working-class lot with a brutal little truth: “you’ve got nothing in your pockets worth passing along.” It is a line that could have come from a kitchen-table conversation, which is exactly why it works.
Everything about “Stepping Stones” is perfect, from Walker’s voice to the stunning solo that lifts it somewhere higher. “Some People” sounds cheerful enough at first, almost like a musical version of my nan’s old theory that “there’s nowt so funny as folk,” but dig deeper, as all the best music demands, and it comes from a place of pain.
By the time “Thank You For Listening” arrives, it feels like loose ends are being tied up. Not neatly, because life rarely works like that, but honestly. And honestly, it has been a pleasure, Joshua Ray.
Ain’t Dead Yet might have been written before Walker knew what he was fighting, but it sounds like a victory all the same.
Rating: 8.5/10
