Joshua Ray Walker Brings His Cancer-Trilogy Tour to Meow Wolf in Santa Fe After Surviving Colon Cancer, Lung Surgery and a Career-Threatening Health Scare

SANTA FE, NM — Joshua Ray Walker arrives in Santa Fe with a story that could have ended his rise just as it was beginning. In the fall of 2023, the Dallas-area singer-songwriter was opening for The Killers in Reno, had sold-out dates in Europe ahead of him and was set to appear on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

Then his appendix burst, and the medical emergency led to a colon cancer diagnosis. Walker later learned he had Stage 3B colon cancer, and doctors at one point misidentified cancer in his lungs as Stage 4 disease. Instead of slowing him down permanently, the ordeal pushed him into one of the most productive stretches of his career.

A childhood spent absorbing everything from bluegrass to Fela Kuti

Walker says music has been part of his life since he was very young. He started on banjo at age 4 and moved to guitar a couple of years later, while spending afternoons with his grandfather, who lived next door and collected records from across many styles.

That family influence was unusually wide-ranging. Walker remembers hearing Gregorian chants, music made by nuns in Europe, Fela Kuti, merengue, salsa, Tejano, Appalachian mountain music, early bluegrass and cowboy songs. Those sounds helped shape a singer whose work has always been hard to box in.

By the time he was a teenager, he was already drawn to fuzzy garage rock and post-rock, not country. That changed when he heard Guy Clark’s “Dublin Blues,” which he says was the first time he really listened to lyrics.

From Dallas busking to hard-won country songs

Walker began playing in bands at 12 and started busking downtown when he was 13, riding a bus into Dallas to play on the street. After he got a driver’s license, he traveled around Texas with his guitar, hoping at minimum to make enough gas money to get home.

Country music did not immediately come naturally to him, but Clark and other Texas songwriters such as Hayes Carll opened the door. In his late teens, he started writing country songs and singing them in public for the first time, which he says was terrifying.

Walker estimates he went to about 150 open mics in a single year because he wanted to force himself to perform. Eventually, he stopped fighting the East Texas twang in his voice and realized singing that way felt more natural and more comfortable on his throat.

A DIY climb that led to three linked albums

When Walker started performing his own country songs in 2012, the work was still deeply DIY. Even in 2017, he says, he was sometimes sleeping in his car while touring. By the time he recorded his first album, Wish You Were Here, in 2019, he already had a decade of material waiting.

That backlog helped fuel two more albums over the next two years, Glad You Made It and See You Next Time. Walker describes those records as a loose trilogy built around colorful but flawed characters he had met along the way.

In 2023, he followed that up with What Is It Even?, a cover album that took on songs associated with artists including Lizzo, Dolly Parton, The Cranberries and Beyoncé, underscoring how broad his tastes remain.

Cancer changed his schedule, his priorities and his output

Walker says the medical scares forced him to take stock of what mattered. During surgery, chemotherapy and the uncertainty that came with the lung diagnosis, he set himself a one-year plan to finish every creative project he had started.

He called longtime collaborator and producer John Pedigo and told him they were going to wrap up everything in that window. The pair ended up finishing 50 songs. After extensive lung surgery, doctors later told Walker they could not find cancer in his lungs after all.

He described that moment with gallows humor, saying they essentially sewed him back up and then realized the cancer was gone. The experience also changed the way he worked, because he no longer wanted to push through everything without saying no.

A trilogy born from treatment, reflection and dark humor

The songs from that period became Walker’s so-called “Cancer Trilogy.” The first release, Tropicana, came out in 2025 and leaned into a beachy, escapist country sound.

The next album, Stuff, took a far stranger approach. Each song is sung from the perspective of an inanimate object you might find at a yard sale, including a brick, a Barbie doll and a bowling ball. Walker says it is the record he may be most proud of.

He says the album also honors the estate-sale obsession he shared with his grandparents, while still grappling with his own mortality. The final chapter, Ain’t Dead Yet, arrived earlier this year as a revised version of an album he had originally completed in 2023 under the title Chasing Sunset.

Weight loss, a documentary and a looser show in Santa Fe

Walker’s creative surge has not been the only visible change. In January, he launched “400 days to 400 pounds,” an online weight-loss project meant to create accountability. It quickly drew about a quarter-million followers, and he says he had lost 86 pounds by the time of the interview.

He has also been part of the recently released documentary Thank You For Listening, which began as a more experimental idea before his cancer diagnosis led him and filmmaker Gene Gallerano to focus on a shorter, straightforward film. Walker said both men wanted the project to be finished while he was still alive to celebrate it.

He says the hardest year of his life also made him a better performer. After months of chemotherapy and repeated shows in Dallas, he learned to fill the space between songs with more confidence. That has made his concerts looser, more honest and, by his account, better.

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