This week Phoenix FM caught up with Irish singer/songwriter Walker Tex. We discussed what he has been up to lately, new music, photography, and filming as well as promoting music remotely.
Things have changed for everyone during the pandemic, but of course, music has seen the biggest halt, how have things changed for you?
The pandemic gave me a lot more time to reassess what was important in life. You go from being able to play and create with friends and other artists to near-complete isolation. I feel I navigated through and weathered the storm. It gave me time to make and build new relationships from a social media standpoint. Through these, it led to more focus on gaining new insights into the production of music and a lot of remote collaborations with some great people.
From your social media, you can see you’ve really got into film and photography, will you be incorporating this with new music?
Yes, This year we really upped the production value, We will be doing “Live from home” style videos which are always fun, I am currently learning editing techniques for both music production and video which will really show as time progresses. Photography and Filming have always been a passion of mine so it was great to rediscover this during the pandemic.
We have a music video coming out very soon which is in production. We worked with @meetpettyphotography who was able to take the vision I had for my latest cover and bring that story to life. Martin Petty has a way of capturing the gritty and moody which I just loved when I saw his previous work.
It’s a difficult time to promote music without being able to play live, how are you finding the promotion side of things after releasing make me smile?
For me, the promotion side was a steep learning curve; I had to learn how to utilize social media better for networking and also become more visually creative and really begin to tell the story behind not just the new release but anything I was promoting. I am lucky in that a lot of friends who are artists gave a lot of great advice and it really helped a lot at times where I was struggling to understand it all. Ultimately you really need to be promoting weeks before and it was only on this release I started to do that, the next challenge is keeping that traction going.
What’s next for Walker Tex?
I have a ton of positive things that I am working on right now. A project with @janae_genna at present on a song she has written. I was enlisted to add guitar, melody, and some vocals so we are excited to get this one finished off and out there. Also, the music video for Make Me Smile is nearing completion with @meetpettyphotography and @Ronnie.lafrenchette. We are doing some promo around the video at present to get the word out there. This summer I will be working with @m.i.stapes where we will embark on co-writing with him producing. With all this going on you will see some new cover videos in between on the Instagram page and hopefully YouTube as well.
You can find all Walker Tex’s new covers through his Instagram and Facebook pages @walkertex.
