The Texas songwriter and his tight-AF band also played fan favorite “Sexy After Dark”
After a months-long tour that found him playing venues from Brooklyn to Boston with Vandoliers, slaying crowds aboard the Outlaw Country Cruise, and returning to the Grand Ole Opry stage, Joshua Ray Walker made his CBS Saturday Morning debut this weekend.
The Dallas, Texas, songwriter delivered three songs off his latest album, See You Next Time. Backed by his tight-AF band — bassist Billy Kuykendall, drummer Trey Pendergrass, and pedal-steel maestro Adam “Ditch” Kurtz — Walker tore through “Three Strikes” and “Sexy After Dark,” before playing a chilling solo rendition of “Flash Paper,” a song written about his late father.
“Three Strikes” was a particularly explosive blast of honky-tonk, with Walker singing about rolling the DUI dice after another night out at the bar: “’Cause it’s once, twice, three strikes a felony / if I keep messing around, this drinking will get the best of me.”
See You Next Time, which added horns to Walker’s twanged-out sound via fan favorite “Sexy After Dark,” is the follow-up to Walker’s 2020 LP Glad You Made It, an album that found him writing incisive songs about topics as varied as boat-show models and suicide. “I write these heartfelt songs, but at the end of the day, if we want to make a living, we’re really just selling beer,” Walker told Rolling Stone. “We get paid to drive for long periods of time and load in gear and stay up late and try to get people to buy alcohol. That’s our job.”
Walker returns to the road next week with shows in Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma. He and the band will play the annual roots-music gathering known as MerleFest in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, on April 27, and embark on a West Coast run with Jade Jackson in May.