Country artist Joshua Ray Walker performs at Silver Moon Brewing in Bend Saturday.

Joshua Ray Walker fell in love with country music not once, but twice.

The first time was when he was a kid in Texas, living next door to his grandfather.

“I’d always hang out in his workshop behind the house, and we’d listen to a lot of bluegrass records,” said Walker, who will play Silver Moon Brewing in Bend Saturday. “I was immediately just drawn in to bluegrass music, and as soon as I could pick up an instrument, I tried playing along. I just really loved that stuff.”

Around age 12, however, Walker — who started playing banjo at age 4 and guitar at 6 — did what a lot of kids do: He started listening to different kinds of music, which quickly changed his focus as a musician.

“When I got an electric guitar and started playing in bands, I wanted to play music that sounded more like the music people my age were listening to,” Walker said. “So I started playing more punk and metal and pop-punk … anything really. I played in a reggae band!”

Walker’s twangy foundation was already rock solid, however. So when a high school friend turned him on to a country radio station that featured top-shelf Texas songwriters like Hayes Carll and Guy Clark, something “clicked,” he said.

“I’d always thought country lyrics were hokey — like it was all about all my dog ran off and my wife left me, you know? I didn’t realize you could write about that stuff (in a clever way), and that song kind of opened my eyes to that,” he said. “It started me down a path of digging into these Texas songwriters, and a year or so after that, was when I started writing country music.”

A dozen years later, Walker is himself one of the Lone Star State’s next great songwriters. Or maybe he has already earned that status. Since 2019, the 31-year-old Dallas resident has released a trilogy of excellent albums that No Depression called “the country music equivalent of the great American novel.”

The three albums are called “Wish You Were Here,” “Glad You Made It” and “See You Next Time,” and they paint a vivid picture of the final night of existence for a timeless, fictional honky-tonk bar, complete with a cast of recurring characters and their intertwining stories.

Walker was inspired to create the trilogy by his own experiences playing country bars — which he started doing at the age of 13. The albums also showcase his seemingly limitless gift for country-ish music in all its forms: tear-in-my-beer, boot-scootin’, bluegrassy, Cajun-flavored, ‘70s Bakersfield-style, glitzy like the ‘80s, classic, modern and beyond.

In other words, the guy is a versatile and verified twang-making machine, and his skills are getting noticed: Already this year, Walker has made his debut on “The Tonight Show,” on the Grand Ole Opry and at Nashville’s hallowed Ryman Auditorium.

The experience has been “pretty surreal,” he said.

“You know, you hope for all this. I’m big on writing down lists of goals,” he said, “and I’ve gotten to check a lot of ‘em off this year. It’s been awesome.”

What: Joshua Ray Walker, with Chris King and Jeshua Marshall 

When: 8 p.m. Saturday

Where: Silver Moon Brewing, 24 NW Greenwood Ave., Bend

Cost: $15 

Contact: silvermoonbrewing.com