Joshua Ray Walker has slowed down enough to feel what he’s feeling.
The mid-tempo, pensive “Chasing Sunsets” is spacious and melancholy like a War on Drugs tune. It opens with this Texan disillusioned in Hollywood, setting a rattled, twilit vibe for the rest of the tune. By the second verse, Walker zeroes in on specifics from his own life, such as this cancer survivor’s actual closest call: nearly drowning near Corpus Christi. Life has come at Walker a little too fast and hard, leaving him fragile at times. So he leans into it: “Memory Lane is a freeway now / At least I get to see how this thing ends,” Walker sings. “When it’s my time I hope that I won’t feel alone.”
Ain’t Dead Yet is the final record in Walker’s cancer survival trilogy. Not that the topic is closed, of course, but the Dallas songwriter penned three LPs while and immediately after colon cancer gave him a too-close view of his own mortality. The first release, 2025’s Tropicana, was a beachy country album about the things Walker wished he could be doing instead of sitting in a hospital. That fall, Walker got experimental with survival LP No. 2: Stuff. A concept album written like theater, Stuff’s songs are effectively monologues from the perspective of items at an estate sale.
