Interview: Butch Walker (January 29th, 2015)

Last week, I got a chance to chat extensively with a personal hero of mine, Butch Walker. We talked about Butch's new album, Afraid of Ghosts, including how the recent loss of his father inspired a new direction for his music, why he decided to have Ryan Adams produce the disc, and why his trademark sarcasm and upbeat songwriting is nowhere to be found. We also touched upon Walker's back catalog, the woeful reasons why no one should be expecting to find Letters on vinyl anytime soon, whether or not The Black Widows will be making music again in the future, and why Butch's protege Jake Sinclair took over most of the production duties on the new Fall Out Boy LP.

Craig Manning (CM): First of all, you started streaming the new record on Tuesday. How have you felt about the reception you've gotten so far?

Butch Walker (BW): Well, I guess for what it's worth to me in the internet world and social media world it seems like, the only reception I would know would be by reading comments...which I always dread doing. But so far, everyone seems to really like it, so...it seems to be connecting, I guess, on an emotional level with a lot of people, and I think that that's the most important thing that I could ever want for that record, is for people to feel like I did when I wrote it, you know?

CM: Yeah! So, tell me a little bit about the writing process for Afraid of Ghosts. You said in one of the posts you made that this was sort of like your version of the film Boyhood, and you also called the album something you've been waiting to write your whole life. What did you mean by those statements?

BW: Well, I guess it's a record that no matter how, like, widely accepted it is from people, it's a record that I feel that, as a musician, I always wanted to have a record hit me feeling-wise the same way that a record like...I don't want to compare it to other records, cause I know that's pretentious...but you know, the same thing like, umm, you know Grace by Jeff Buckley, or Harvest Moon by Neil Young, or...any record that, like, had kind of an emotional weight to it that would just knock me out and make me cry, you know? Those are powerful records, and people hurt, so you know, they need music to...to deal. You know, you're just not in a sincere position to write that kind of record all the time; because you know...at least I'm not. Because I haven't always been, you know, feeling that way.

And so, I think after losing my father, it triggered writing a lot of these kind of songs. And I just didn't ever want to put a record like that out without something...unfortunately, something devastating had to happen to break all that out. But, I'm glad I did, and like I said, I've kind of been waiting my whole life to have a record like this that I can sincerely back and know that every bit of it came from my heart.

Because a lot of times, you're just having to make a record because everyone wants you to go in and make a record, and you're like...in a good place or something, and so your songs have to end up reflecting some sort of...either cynical, witty...you know, whatever element to the lyrics. And that's not always what I feel or what I want. It's hard to write a bunch of songs that are from being damaged unless you have been.

CM: So there are definitely a lot of songs on this record that are definitely about your dad, and then there are other songs that are sort of more character-focused stories, like "21+" and "Chrissie Hynde" and "Still Drunk." I was wondering how those two approaches to writing came together on this particular album.

BW: Well, I mean, no one wants to hear an entire record about your dad dying, you know? And I certainly didn't write an entire album's worth of songs like that. I just, I think all these were...they were just all cut from the same fabric, in the same time frame, while writing. And so, I believe that it just became super confessional. To come forward with these songs, and some of these subjects, even if a couple of them are fiction or based on someone else besides myself, you know? I think that that's what gives them all a common format, it's that everything isn't awesome always. (Laughs) So I think, lyrically, I kind of was writing a lot of songs about things that weren't very awesome, or without an awesome outlook. To me it's just real life.

CM: You've had a hand in producing all of your solo records prior to this one. How did it come to pass that you handed over the reigns here to Ryan Adams.

BW: Well, it really was the fact that we...I didn't want to...I just really didn't want to record and do my own songs in the studio by myself anymore. I just felt like...I felt like I was getting very bored with myself, and this was no album and no collection of songs to have be feeling predictable for me. And I think that's just like anything. Once you get good at something, or you master something and you learn how to do it very well, you...at least in my mind, I'm kind of like "What's next?" And it's hard to say, "oh, I'll just keep pushing myself and pushing my boundaries and..." whatever, I mean...I'm not trying to make Sgt Pepper here. And I'm not trying to make OK Computer. It's like...I need these songs to just come out very honest and bare, and to me, I felt like recording that myself, I didn't think I would give it a fair shake.

And so, it felt like the right thing to do, and luckily Ryan is just...he's just a mad man kind of a wizard with how his brain works, and the way he can...manipulate you in the studio into doing something that you didn't know you can do. It was just...to me it was really incredible and magical to be inspired like that again, and have that kick in the ass from somebody. Not necessarily somebody who would sit behind their console and fiddle with fucking microphones for seven hours, and 18 mic shootouts and...that stuff's boring and I can't stand it and it makes me want to shoot myself in the face.

And so, that being said, anyone who would have been more of a technical engineer type person as the producer? I wouldn't be able to make a record with them, because I make records kind of the same way Ryan does, where I go very fast and try to capture whatever's happening in that moment, and keep it fresh and the spontaneity there. And so, he was perfect for that, because it was all from the heart, and all about the feeling, and all about the heart of the song. And not about, like, spending an hour on a snare sound. Because I don't give a shit about that, that's boring to me. And people who are thinking about that stuff too much in the studio are not thinking enough about the song, or about the lyric or whatever.

So, to me, it felt good, because his idea was the same as mine, which was "We're gonna get in there, we're gonna set it up, we're gonna do this live, I'll put the band on the floor, straight to tape, one take maybe two, and we're not going to be comfortable with the song long enough for it to sound too content and too polished and too professional." In his words, in my texts back and forth to him--which was great--he was like, "It's gonna be like..." (Laughs) this was awesome. He said, "It's gonna be like Armageddon: we're gonna land on the rock and we're gonna do our job and we're gonna fly off." You know, he's talking about the asteroid, you know. It was a good analogy and it was funny and it was like...and that's kind of what we did: we like, we landed on the rock, and we did our job, and we got off...before it exploded.

So, it was really...to me, four days later, having a record in the can, it's just like, yeah that's the way it should be. It's like Christmas, you know? I can still listen to that record and still hear things and find things that are...that I've never caught before, and still enjoy it. As opposed to going, "Jesus Christ, I spent six months making that fucking record. I never want to hear it again."

CM: So, any chance that Ryan would have you in to produce one of his records?

BW: Well yeah! Honestly, that was sort of our plan. You know, we had planned on me going in and working with him, and making this last record that he ended up putting out. But, you know, the only problem was, we didn't actually get to do that because he worked on this record...like, his schedule's kind of, any time he was off the road he was in the studio working on songs. And me, any time I was off the road, I was hanging with my family and my son and my wife, and I was trying to like, you know, figure out work in the studio for records I was producing. And also my father was dying. And so, when my father was about to pass, and he did pass, I just didn't even...I couldn't think about work or anything or doing anything. I just had to go away for a while and get my head together.

So you know, Ryan ended up producing the record himself, which was awesome, because I think...he knows what he's doing. He's made enough records, for God's sakes, that are incredible, that...he's not a beginner. So, you know, all of the sudden I see him in a hotel, at this hotel that I was staying at in New York and we're in the same hotel, and we went and had lunch. And I said, "I've got a bunch of songs for a new record," he's like "Oh God!" and he just got excited. He gets excited like a 15-year-old boy. And he's like "I've gotta hear 'em, let's go up to your hotel room." And he made me go up to the hotel room and play 'em on acoustic guitar. And he just started tearing them apart, you know, like changing lines here and there, and saying stuff like "Oh, you should sing it in this key and do it like this."

And, you know, I just really respected that. Because, nobody ever wants to tell me...nobody ever has the balls to tell me what to do, because they think I already know how to do it, cause I do it for a living anyway. And so, and maybe that's...it just takes someone who's kind of ballsy like him, this punk rock kid, to be like "No, fuck you, that sucks. Do it like this." And, you know, part of me is--at this point, I was submissive enough to be like, "Yeah man, I love it, let's do it like that." So, it worked out really well.

CM: Yeah, you said--I think it was on Tumblr--you said that "Father's Day" the song was kind of a struggle to write, just because it was so personal. How did guys like Ryan and Bob Mould help you sort of get what you were looking for on that song?

BW: You know, that was one of the songs that when I played it for Ryan in my hotel room, I was...it was incomplete. But I knew it was an important song to me, I knew I really needed it, and I wanted to finish it, and I wanted it to be great. And that was one of the songs that Ryan started, like, side-writing verses for right there on the spot, and was like "Oh, you can't say that, say this!" And it was wild, cause like, for such a personal song I didn't know if I should hit somebody for trying to tell me how to write a personal song like that, or, you know, hug him for caring that much.

So, what happened is...it ended up being one verse that Ryan completely wrote. That's the one that's kind of more of a vignette, more of a backdrop for the setting, which is like the second verse. You know, "there's girls on the corner smoking cigarettes" and, you know, "ashes in the breeze." That kind of stuff was very classic Ryan. And then you combine it with my chorus and my verses, talking about very personal experiences of...sleeping in my father's bedroom at my parent's house the night after he died, it's just...that was the idea.

And then, you know, Bob coming in basically was kind of an added pleasure, because he had just sadly gone through the same experience, was very close with his dad, and lost his dad two years ago that week that he came in the studio and we recorded it. And my dad had passed one year ago that week. And so we both kind of...we'd never met before, so when met, we kind of hit it off, and he got out and sang the background harmonies in the chorus, and it just made my...hair on my arms stand up. It just added a whole other layer of strange emotion, you know, from somebody else who shared the same thing,

CM: So this sounds very much like a country-influenced set of songs, to me. You've sort of been toying with that direction for a few albums now, but this is the first album where I feel it's really...it would almost fit into that genre. What inspired you to go in that direction?

BW: Well...you know, I don't know if it's as much a country record...I mean, I think maybe people will say that just because they hear some steel guitar on it and stuff. But you know, I've always had those elements in the last, like, 10 years on my records. I've never really tried to deny that. Or to make a flat-out country record, and this is definitely not that.

I mean, I feel like Ryan Adams is the same way, where a lot of people just kind of slag him off as country or alt-country or whatever you want to call it, and then he'll turn around and make a rock and roll record like he just did. Or he'll make one that's like punk rock. And in a way, he and I are similar in that way, like, I don't think...we came from so many different influences that we don't want to be pigeonholed as one like one thing. Or just, like, "Oh yeah, he's county." "Oh yeah, he's rock." I mean, I haven't done a record that's like my last record for as long as I've been making them. Not really.

And it's funny, I think some people think that this record is--because Ryan produced it, they think it sounds like me doing a Ryan Adams record. And it's like...we're two completely different animals. These are songs I wrote, and got in front of a microphone and sang them in one take without any edits or anything like that. So, that doesn't sound to me like I'm doing anything but just being myself, you know?

CM: So this is also sort of the first record of yours that doesn't have...I mean, there aren't really any rock songs, and there's none of your trademark sarcasm or any of that. Was it a conscious decision to sort of write in a different direction because you were tackling serious subject matter, or did it just come that you were writing more acoustic-oriented stuff?

BW: Well, I mean not necessarily. I wasn't even sure what instrument I was going to play on this record, because I didn't even want it to be...I didn't want to play anything on it to be honest, I just wanted it to be a record of great songs that...that have piano, and acoustic, and electric, and whatever. It's all...to me, it's just music, and I think the big thing is that people who are familiar with a lot of my back catalog of stuff...they might be looking for, as you said, you know "Where's the sneer?" Like, where's the tongue-in-cheek, where's the sarcasm? But, you know, I could have written these songs as, like, metal productions with detuned guitars and whatever, and still lyrically, I didn't want to be cynical or sarcastic.

But, it just so happens that, because of the lyrical content, it favored being more cinematic and organic. More beauty and less carnival, you know? (Laughs) So, to me, it's like I said, it's the kind of record I listen to when I'm feeling blue and when I need music to medicate me. And, you know, that's part of why I wanted them to sound like that. Not to make it sound like one particular artist or anything. I mean, there's all kind of influence on it. There's like tons of Elvis and 50s doo-wop influence, and, you know, Neil Young, and Elvis...Elvis Costello, Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen...there's a lot of that, you know?

CM: So are there any plans yet for the tour for this album?

BW: Yeah, we're actually going to start touring in spring, so we're booking dates as we speak.

CM: Are you going to do solo acoustic stuff, or are you going to have a full band?

BW: Ehh, I'm not sure. I haven't figured it out. But...I kind of prefer not to even think about that, or put that in people's brains because I don't think it should matter, you know? It's like...I may end up doing both. I don't know.

CM: What's it like to have Johnny Depp play guitar on one of your songs?

BW: Hmmmm...well. I didn't even really know who was coming in the studio that day, because Ryan kept referring to it as like...his buddy J Diggle is going to come by? And I'm like, "I don't know what a J Diggle is, but I'm sure if it's a buddy of his..." I trust Ryan musically, wholeheartedly, so if Ryan and a buddy come by and play on my record, I'm sure they're gonna be really good. So I was just like, "Yeah man, whatever!" I was just being, like I said, very agreeable and very submissive on this record for a reason, cause I'd never done it before. So I was trusting every groove, I was like, "whatever you wanna do, let's do it. I wanna have someone do this a different way and not my way."

And so in walks Johnny Depp, and I was like "Oh! That's J Diggle." So he ended up picking up a guitar and ripping an amazing solo at the end of "21+," and then got up and got in a limo and flew to London to make a giant movie. So, it was very classic. But he was great. He was awesome. Couldn't have been a sweeter kind of laid back, humble person, which I loved. And no weirdness, no...the one thing about him that feels bigger than you is just his presence, but not his brain, not his mind. He's not trying to be the star of the show, he just is. That's a God-given talent right there.

CM: So I have a few questions left, and these are from actually readers at AbsolutePunk. The first is "Letters turned 10 last year, and The Rise and Fall is 10 next year. Have you ever thought about doing anniversary tours or vinyl presses to mark the milestones?"

BW: This is where it gets complicated, and a lot of people don't understand it because it's just a boring business blah blah bullshit. I put out those records on a major label, for Sony. And they're just not very cooperative in giving your masters back to do whatever you want with them. And they certainly don't think they're going to make any money at it, so they have no reason to do it. So, that's the reason why I can't just go out and put Letters on vinyl, or The Rise and Fall, because I don't own the masters, sadly, which is one of the worst music business clichés ever that people fall victim to, is signing a big major record deal and then realizing you'll never own the rights to that record ever again.

So...It doesn't mean I can't play the songs live, but, unless I wanted to do some goofy, like, re-record the record like people do? Which I...that's just stupid, you know? I have no desire...that's a moment in time. It is what it is. There's a million things I detest when I hear those records that I wish I would have done differently, probably. But I would detest re-recording them more, I think, cause that's just dumb, you know? And I think they were good for the time, but unfortunately, I can't do what I want with the master recordings of those.

But of course I could go out and play them live, though, if I wanted to. So that's...that's a decent idea! (Laughs)

BW: Well you did do the residencies a few years ago, where you played a few cities and you did full album shows.

BW: Yep, I remember that! Some songs I'd prefer never to play again though, so...

CM: Yeah, was there one off The Rise and Fall that you actually didn't play at the full-album show? Or did you play them all?

BW: I think I played 'em all.

CM: I couldn't remember if "Paid to Get Excited" got played.

BW: No, I played it somewhere, I know I did.

CM: Alright. So, another question. The gist of it is that, a few years ago you were really consistent about putting out live albums and EPs and stuff, even if it was just a digital only release, and I guess we haven't--I didn't even realize this--but we haven't gotten a live album in a few years. Do you have any plans to do something like that again, or do you sort of feel like it's redundant now that anyone can just go on YouTube and see live stuff.

BW: No, no, no, I mean...I'm fine with people recording shows and YouTube and stuff, that's how I discover a lot of new music, too, so I'm fine with that. But, yeah, I mean, putting out a proper live album/video of a show...that takes work and money to make it a real production. To answer your question, yes, we have something pretty special in the works that is related to the hometown show that I did in Cartersville to commemorate my father. And I won't go into it right now, but it's going to be great.

CM: Okay, very cool! And the last question I have from a reader is are the Black Widows done? Do you think you guys could reunite for another album in a few years, or have those guys sort of gone their separate ways.

BW: Oh, we all have gone our separate ways. But we all still talk and love each other and will definitely...I'm sure we'll make music again at some point. And you know, who knows? Maybe it will be all the original members in the same room and we'll see. But um...it's gonna be...I mean, everybody's got other shit going on, so I don't think...I mean, it's not reuniting the Police or anything like that. It's not...you know, we're not that big of a deal. But we would only do it because it was time to have fun and see each other again. Because we definitely had a great chemistry

CM: Oh yeah, totally. Speaking of the Black Widows, Jake Sinclair seems to be following in your footsteps and becoming a very in-demand producer and songwriter. What's it been like to sort of watch his evolution in that way?

BW: Well that's the way I had planned it from the beginning. When I met Jake, I knew that not only was this kid gonna be big but I wanted him to be big with us. So when he came to work with me after I had worked on his band's last record, The Films, and he started engineering for me, I just knew that he was gonna be more than just an engineer. Because he had the talent and the songwriting ability and was super musical. One of the most talented guys I know. And I kind of just knew that he was gonna be big, or at least have promise in that world and he wanted it real bad.

And so we worked together for like five years making records to where it was like, man, I can't hold him back anymore. I'd just be holding him back if I just had him stay engineering records for me, because he's way too talented to do that. So it's great, because we keep it all in the family, you know? My manager manages him now, and we all kind of discuss all the projects we're doing next, openly, so that usually there's some sort of involvement with all of us. So I couldn't be more happy and more proud of him.

CM: Yeah, that's great. He did a bunch of stuff on the new Fall Out Boy, right?

BW: That's right.

CM: Did you work on that one, or did you just do Save Rock and Roll.

BW: I did Save Rock and Roll and then I did a song called "Irresistible" and also I did the song "Immortals." But I just was...I was in the mode of wanting to put my own record together and get this going, and then Ryan offered for me to go out and tour with him, and I really wanted to do it and really wanted to focus on getting something going for this record myself. And you know, Fall Out Boy needed to...they're a big, in-demand band, so they couldn't sit around and wait for me. And it was the perfect opportunity for Jake to go in and kind of do my job. And it worked out great, so, you know they had a great chemistry and made a great record.

CM: Yeah, and I think that just came through today, it's the number one record in the country, so that's great. Alright, I think that's all I had for you. Do you have anything you want to add?

BW: Well now, Craig, I appreciate it, man! Thanks for always just being in my corner. I appreciate all the support. And anything I can do for you, let me know, and I'll look forward to seeing you on the road.

A Beer Snob's Take on the Bud Light 50/50/1 Concert Series (Summer 2013 Archive Post)

 Butch Walker and Friends Live at the Murphy in Chicago (August 1, 2013)

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A Beer Snob's Take on the Bud Light 50/50/1 Concert Series

As much as I grossly dislike Bud Light (and most of the people who think it’s a “good beer, bro!”), the concept behind the 50/50/1 concert was a pretty great one. In case you haven’t seen the myriad TV commercials that have been advertising the concert series in recent weeks, here’s a short primer: using QR codes and smart phones, Bud Light set up a big music contest with a wide range of prizes, from downloads to Live Nation concert cash to free headphones. The top prize—at least in my mind, probably not in the eyes of people who listen exclusively to top 40 radio—were tickets to one of the 50 (or I guess 51, because California for some reason got two) shows that played out across the country last night. The line-up and concert map were both pretty killer, bringing out both current buzz acts (Kendrick Lamar played Detroit, Miguel was one of the California artists, etc.) and seasoned club show veterans (Gaslight Anthem got Vermont, Jimmy Eat World took the Damage tour to Missouri, The Hold Steady were sequestered in Wyoming, etc.) But as fate would have it, the show I was most interested in getting tickets for was the one in the state I just relocated to: Butch Walker and friends, burning down Chicago.

Despite my best efforts, I had no luck winning a pair of tickets for this concert through the regular contest regulations. Short of doing something drastic—like actually paying for a case of Bud Light—getting enough QR codes to land a pair of tickets proved to be a reasonable challenge. I got my fair share of free downloads and Live Nation cash, but by the time my Facebook account got mad at me and stopped letting me win, I was no closer to the Butch Walker Chicago show than I had been when I started. Then yesterday, as I opened up my computer after lunch, my moment arrived. Butch had just sent out a tweet offering free tickets to the first 20 people to reply. In the two minutes since the tweet had hit the net, a dozen or so fans had already responded. I quickly put my name on the list, won a ticket, and re-arranged my schedule. A drive into the city, three separate bouts with road construction, and a hefty parking garage fee later (seriously, why the hell would anyone ever want to live in this state?) and I was waiting outside a place called the Murphy for my favorite guy in all of music to let us in.

In all of the concerts I’ve been to, I’ve never seen anything quite like this. First of all, the Murphy is not the kind of small, sweaty club or dingy dive bar that Butch usually plays. With a gorgeous stained glass window towering above the stage, flanked on either side by a pair of majestic white-washed pillars, this place looked more like a church than a rock ‘n’ roll venue. Google the Murphy, and you’ll find that the location is typically known as a venue for wedding receptions; no wonder no one knew where to find the building or what to expect when we got there. (“What the hell is this place?” Butch would ask later.) To add to the swanky atmosphere, there were sharply-dresser waiters wandering the concert floor and guys with tables full of pop, water, and beer waiting to assist guests as they walked through the door. On the plus side, all beverages were already paid for; on the negative side, the only beer option was Bud Light. “Well, um...I’ll have a Coke then.”

After making friends with a few Butch die-hards about two or three rows off the stage, we were treated to a solid opening set by Daniel Wade, an acoustic troubadour who supposedly won his opportunity to play this show through another social media contest on Butch’s Facebook. Wade was a nicely low-key opener, and his style of stripped-down, go-it-alone acoustic folk-rock fit with the mood of the evening. In the meantime, the Bud Light 50/50/1 concept was in the process of failing miserably, mostly because a lot of people who had actually won the tickets through the contest had evidently decided not to bother showing up. (Maybe because people who drink Bud Light don’t listen to good music; I stereotype, it’s faster.) Apparently Butch was pretty pissed about it too, because at 10:00, when he was supposed to go onstage, he sent bassist Jake Sinclair out to announce that he wasn’t playing the fucking show, man. Just kidding: Jake said that, since the turn-out hadn’t been too stellar, they were going to open the show to the public and that we should all invite our friends to come on down. Meanwhile, Butch was tweeting all of this from backstage, probably while downing shots of Jameson and fuming about how Bud Light hadn’t let him give away more tickets to real fans earlier.

All of this amounted to Butch taking the stage at 10:30, a half hour later than he had initially planned. Since the show needed to be over by midnight, that meant Butch’s usual 2-hour setlist was going to be truncated a bit. I don’t know if this was the fault of Chicago and curfew regulations or Bud Light and some standard “finish” time that had been laid for the entire 50/50/1 concert series, but suffice to say that I’m not too fond of either entity. Regardless of the time constraints though, Butch delivered completely, and gave newcomers and die-hard fans alike a prototypical post-Sycamore Meadows Butch Walker concert experience. Taking the stage alone for his now-customary opening solo set, Butch winded his way through a pair of emotionally bombastic piano ballads (“Passed Your Place” and “Joan”) before trading the keys for a sleek white electric guitar and a brand new song ("Peachtree Battle") that will supposedly be on his next release. The song was beautiful and nostalgic, a remembrance of small-town streets and young love, and it kicked my expectations for the new album into even higher gear. The way Butch can achieve pin-drop ambiance during a solo performance is truly unparalleled, and it was fully on display at the Murphy, even with a smaller-than-average crowd and a handful of listeners who were probably only on hand to drink.

Fan favorites “Don’t Move”—my personal top Butch Walker song—and “Going Back/Going Home”—with a tongue-in-cheek rap section that sums up Butch’s entire career in less than two minutes—were next on the docket, and the powerful sing-alongs they engendered had me wishing that the entire show could just be Butch solo, switching back and forth between new songs and old favorites. Of course, that was a pipe dream: the opening chords of the Springsteenian “Closer to the Truth and Further from the Sky” brought Butch’s band—Jake Sinclair and a drummer whose name I didn’t catch—onstage, and moments later, the venue was filled with electricity and noise. If anyone’s ears weren’t already ringing by that point, they certainly would be now.

The rest of the set essentially followed the rubric that Butch used for his similarly celebratory New Year’s Eve show (which also took place in Chicago). Live standards from Butch’s last few records with the Black Widows (his shifting array of backing musicians) provided the set’s backbone, from the vaudevillian Beatles pop of “Pretty Melody” to the southern rock rave-up that is “She Likes Hair Bands,” from the eighties-pop throwback of “Synthesizers” (complete with a now-customary “Come On, Eileen” snippet) to the raucous rock ‘n’ roll of main set closer, “Summer of ’89.” In between, we got a few more new songs (and did I hear that Butch was only planning on releasing an EP this fall?!!), including the audience-participation anthem,“I’ve Been Waiting for This,” and the rousing “Just Let It Go Where It’s Supposed To,” a touching folk-rock tribute to Butch’s ailing father, and one of the best songs he’s written in years.

There were a few surprises in store for old fans though. Shovels & Rope, a guy/girl country music duo made up of Michael Trent, one of Butch’s songwriting partners, and Carrie Ann Hearst, Trent’s wife, arrived for the dusk-folk gen that was “Closest Thing to You I’m Gonna Find,” and stuck around providing back-up vocals for the remainder of the main set. They even got an opportunity to sing “Birmingham,” the key track from O’ Be Joyful, their underappreciated debut album from last year. The duo’s arrival explained the “Butch Walker and Friends” tag on the ticket, and it was nice to see Trent and Sinclair, former bandmates from glam-rock group (and former Butch Walker opener), The Films, back together again. Despite the commercialized nature of the Bud Light concert series, Butch did this show entirely in his own way, and it never felt like the promotional aspects of the event clouded the power of the music.

I saw my first Butch Walker concert (and my first concert ever) on the 100+ degree evening of August 1, 2006. As I entered the Murphy on Thursday night for my eighth Butch Walker concert, it had been seven years to the day since that first night, and in that time, a lot has changed. I’ve gone from 15 to 22, for one thing. My music tastes have shifted and changed in ways that I never thought they would. I finished high school, finished college, got a job (sort of). And Butch put out three more records (four if you count the 2008 album from the 1969 side project), moving from glam rock to classic folk to alt-country to no-nonsense rock ‘n’ roll and back again. Band members have come and gone, songs have entered and exited the setlist, hell, Butch even got onstage at the Grammys a few years ago to play some songs with Taylor Swift and Stevie Nicks. But as Butch wrapped up the show on Thursday night, with a hair-metal-infused new song (“End of the World”) and a particularly unhinged take on an old one (“3 Kids in Brooklyn”), it could have been that night in 2006 all over again. Whether you judge shows by energy, emotion, song choice, sequencing, longevity, crowd participation, or some combination of the above, Butch Walker has always delivered in the club show environment like no one else, and that held true for the show at the Murphy last night, ticketing snafus, piss beer, and weeknight curfews aside. He says he’ll be back in November? I’ll be back too.

Setlist:

1. Passed Your Place, Saw Your Car, Thought of You
2. Joan
3. Peachtree Battles
4. Don't Move
5. Going Back/Going Home
6. Closer to the Truth and Further From the Sky
7. Pretty Melody
8. Just Let It Go Where It's Supposed To
9. Closest Thing to You I'm Gonna Find
10. I've Been Waiting for This
11. Birmingham (Shovels & Rope)
12. Synthesizers
13. She Likes Hair Bands
14. Summer of '89

Encore:

15. End of the World
16. 3 Kids in Brooklyn

Butch Walker Liver Review - The Bottom Lounge (Chicago, IL), New Year's Eve 2012

Butch Walker

Live at the Bottom Lounge, Chicago, IL

December 31, 2012

When Butch Walker took the stage at Chicago’s Bottom Lounge late Monday evening, ready to ring in the New Year with a raucous crowd of fans (many of them aided and abetted by the ticket’s “open bar” provision), it was clear that the 42-year-old singer/songwriter was doing pretty well. He was all alone for the first few minutes, reprising the a cappella version of “Cigarette Lighter Love Song” that opened shows on his tour last fall, and as the set went forward, “reprisal” became a fairly good word to describe the proceedings. For me, the set was fairly familiar and straightforward, beginning with the usual dose of intimacy (“Cigarette Lighter” segued into a solo piano performance of the emotive ballad “Joan”) and then transitioning into a typical post-2008 Butch Walker show. Aside from the opening duo and a late-set inclusion of the sarcastic ditty that is “Race Cars & Goth Rock,” tonight’s line-up was culled almost exclusively from Walker’s last three records. That meant that the one-two punch of “Going Back/Going Home” and “Closer to the Truth and Further From the Sky” (the signature songs from 2008’s Sycamore Meadows, arguably Butch’s signature release) was well in place as the transition between the show-opening solo set and full-band blow-out began.

“Closer to the Truth” saw the entrance of Walker’s team for the night, a gang that included bassist Jake Sinclair (a fixture of Walker’s backing band, the Black Widows), drummer Stacy Jones (the frontman for American Hi-Fi), and Renaissance man Chris Thacker (who handled everything from auxiliary guitar to piano to mandolin). Butch himself seemed well-equipped for the New Year’s Eve party atmosphere, opting for an electric guitar rather than an acoustic for the entirety of the show, and scorching his way through proven crowd-pleasers like “Dublin Crow,” “The Weight of Her,” “She Likes hair Bands,” “Synthesizers,” “Summer of ’89,” and especially “3 Kids in Brooklyn.” Credit Walker’s most recent record, the 2011 rock ‘n’ roll revival of The Spade, for much of the infectious energy. That record was, quite simply, made to be played live, and an occasion like this one only rendered those songs more electric.

But while Walker’s ability to rock the house was in full supply on New Year’s Eve, the most special thing about this show (and about the nearly identical one Walker played at Chicago’s Double Door the night before) was the appearance of three new songs. Butch and the Black Widows went down to Nashville to write and record a new album at the tail end of November, and the progress they’ve made is promising, to say the least. Walker has never shied away from his country influences, especially on more recent records, but these three songs show a deeper enthrallment into folk and southern rock than anything he’s done so far. Butch rolled out the best of the new songs early, a backwoods country romp called “Let It Go Where It’s Supposed To” that he wrote about his relationship with his aging father. Prefaced by a lengthy introduction (where Butch actually called his parents to say hello), “Let It Go” burst with affection and energy, building to a readymade sing-along chorus that was nothing short of transcendent.

And singing along was definitely the name of the game with this latest batch of tunes. Always a proponent of audience participation (the nah-nah-nah chorus of his career-defining “When the Canyons Ruled the City” marked it as of the greatest encore songs of all time), Walker paraded out a pair of future fan favorites that allowed for just that. The first one, “I’ve Been Waiting for This,” rivaled “Canyons” in shout-along capability (and in twangy classicism), while the second, “End of the World,” positioned the crowd around a searing, southern-rock-meets-hair-metal guitar lick. Where “Let It Go” represented a full-on immersion into the Nashville scene, these two songs played as a more retrospective collision of where Walker has come from and where he’s going. With both, we can hear pieces of his past, from the freak-power-pop of his Marvelous 3 days to the glammy rock ‘n’ roll of 2006’s The Rise and Fall of Butch Walker and the Lets-Go-Out-Tonites! If the rest of the new album--which should drop this spring or summer--is this exciting, Butch could be headed back for Album of the Year territory.

SETLIST

Cigarette Lighter Love Song
Joan
Going Back/Going Home
Closer to the Truth and Further From the Sky
Closest Thing to You I’m Gonna Find
Dublin Crow
Let It Go Where It’s Supposed To
The Weight of Her
I’ve Been Waiting For This

NEW YEAR’S COUNTDOWN - Auld Lang Syne

Pretty Melody
Race Cars and Goth Rock
She Likes Hair Bands
Synthesizers
Summer of ‘89
End of the World
The 3 Kids in Brooklyn

ENCORE

Suckerpunch

Butch Walker - Afraid of Ghosts

Sometimes, albums need to be made. Whether motivated by the break-up of a long relationship, the death of a loved one, or some other life-changing incident, there are certain records that aren't just artistic choices for the musician making them, but artistic necessities. Butch Walker is no stranger to these kinds of records. He made one of them six years ago, after losing his home in a wildfire and getting a new perspective on the things that really mattered; he did it again two years ago, hurrying to finish a set of songs so that his father would hear them before he died. Both of those albums, the 2008 LP Sycamore Meadows and the 2013 EP Peachtree Battle dealt with heartbreaking situations, but turned them into life-affirming statements. The former is a reminder that material possession is never the most important thing in life, while the latter is a love letter to Butch's father and the relationship the two shared; both are the kind of personal and intimate records artists don't make anymore.

If Peachtree Battle was a loving farewell to a father, though, then Butch's seventh solo LP, titled Afraid of Ghosts, is the grieving process. And once again, it's a record that Butch needed to make. Written in the tumultuous year that followed his dad's passing, and recorded in just four days at Ryan Adams' Pax Am studios, Afraid of Ghosts feels both measured and spontaneous. After making a pair of raucous studio albums with his backing band, The Black Widows, Butch returns on Afraid of Ghosts to the well that provided his two most stirring accomplishments as a singer/songwriter: Letters and Sycamore Meadows. Among Butch fans, those two records are remembered as his most personal and introspective, and for good reason. On songs like "Joan," "Going Back/Going Home," and "ATL," he blended the autobiographical with the fictional, dreaming up down-on-their-luck characters as a means of examining his own life. He follows those lines to Ghosts, and comes up with a record that dares to be even more personal than his previous high points.

Not that he's forgotten what he learned on those Black Widows records, though. Ever since his 2006 LP, The Rise and Fall of Butch Walker and the Lets Go Out Tonites, Walker has been showing more and more interest in country music. Those influences came to a head on 2010's I Liked it Better When You Had No Heart, when he teamed up with Michael Trent—one half of Americana duo Shovels & Rope—to write an album that completely departed from his earlier style. And while he backed off the country a bit on 2011's The Spade, in favor of loud summertime rock 'n' roll, the influence was still there in songs like "Closest Thing to You I'm Gonna Find" and "Dublin Crow."

With Afraid of Ghosts, Butch Walker has made his most country/folk-influenced album yet. But those who view "country" as a four-letter word needn't worry: this isn't a bro country LP in the vein of Florida Georgia Line and Luke Bryan. Heck, it's not even comparable to the arena-rock/country hybrid that was Keith Urban's recent Fuse—a very solid album that Butch himself helped to write and produce. Instead, Afraid of Ghosts feels like classic alt-country, comparable to the work Nashville's most legendary figures or in the vein of recent albums by the likes of Jason Isbell or Ryan Adams. Perhaps even more apt would be a comparison to Springsteen's Nebraska, since that album's stark hopelessness is mirrored in more than a few of this album's key tracks. Ghosts is a record that explores similar settings to what modern radio country has been all about—bars, the highway, the south as a whole—but twists those themes in dark and often nightmarish ways.

On "21+", for instance, the narrator isn't the young gun sharing shots with his bros on a Friday night, playing pool and celebrating the limitlessness of life. Instead, he's the guy behind the bar, pouring drinks for all those naïve kids. He's the guy who's trapped inside a small town and a dead-end life, selling a little bit more of his soul every day in an effort to keep going. In the song, he sits down after work, raiding the bar for free beer and pondering an escape. "Daddy, what will I be if I ever grow up?/Can I get out of a town that drowns everything I love?/Come hell or high water, I'm gonna leave here when I'm sober/Don't wanna be 21 and over." When movie star Johnny Depp barrels in with a fractious and flammable electric guitar solo, it's a moment that could easily be played as a publicity stunt, but instead, it functions to underline the suffering and frustration of a crashed American Dream. It's a knockout punch.

There's a lot of darkness on Afraid of Ghosts, and it doesn’t disappear outside of the bar that's become a prison in "21+." In the lead single, "Chrissie Hynde," the narrator is driving around town listening to Pretenders records and basking in his final hours of freedom before being hauled off to serve time in an actual prison. When he bids farewell to his family in the second verse, envisioning a better life somewhere on down the road, but knowing it's too late for him to become the husband or father he wants to be, it's a heartbreaking moment. Similarly shattering is "How Are Things, Love?", which may or may not re-introduce us to the character from "Chrissie Hynde" after he's been released. "Did you get rid of the ring, love?" he asks on the final chorus, accompanied by a weeping steel guitar. It's a question left hanging in the air as the song ends, with a simple and wrenching "I hope you're well" as the sign off.

Longtime Butch fans—especially the ones who still hold his work with the Marvelous 3, or his first solo full-length, 2002's Left of Self-Centered, to be his highest accomplishments—might have a few gripes with Afraid of Ghosts. Gone are the power pop choruses; gone are the big rock songs; gone are the lyrics littered with sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek one-liners; long gone is any indication that Butch was ever the lead guitarist in a hair metal band. This is Walker's slowest, quietest, bleakest, and most serious record ever. But that doesn't mean the sunlight never breaks through the trees, or that anyone with ears could reasonably describe Afraid of Ghosts as "depressing."

On the contrary, there are a slew of incredibly life-affirming moments on this record, thanks to the fact that, at the end of the day, everything comes back around to Butch's dad. He's there in the mission statement of a title track ("I'm gonna take what scares me the most, and turn it into something real," Butch sings on the chorus). He's there in the self-described "I Love You," the closest this album ever gets to being jaunty or upbeat. He's definitely there in the funereal "Autumn Leaves," a sobering song written about cancer. And then there's "Father's Day," the best song on the record and probably one of the four or five best songs Butch has written in his entire career. Suffice to say that it's tough to get through the last verse—or to even read the lyrics—without choking up.

"Sunday morning, Father's Day
The first without my dad
As I look into my little boy's eyes
It takes all I have
Not to break right down in front of him
When he smiles at me
See you don't become a man
Until you lose your dad, you see"

Butch has been unflinchingly honest in his music in the past. Whether he was baring his soul on a breakup song ("Cigarette Lighter Love Song," "Best Thing You Never Had") or spilling his entire life story in a two-minute rap breakdown ("Going Back/Going Home"), Butch Walker is one of the only songwriters I can think of who has never wanted anything to stand between himself and his fans. It's that kind of honesty that allows for the intimate and electric connection he forges with the crowd at live shows, and the same honesty that fuels Afraid of Ghosts. It all culminates on "Father's Day," first with the chilling verse above, and second with a bruising guitar solo, courtesy of Ryan Adams. Husker Du guitarist Bob Mould is in there too, contributing rhythm guitar and backing vocals, but it's the Adams solo that provides the catharsis for the song, and for the album as a whole. Every emotion you feel when you lose someone you love, from anger to grief, is conveyed in that 60-second burst of noise. The subject matter of the song might be intensely personal, but this moment at least is completely universal.

Which brings me to Ryan Adams. In the former Whiskeytown frontman, Butch has found his Steve Van Zandt, his consigliere . Those who saw the two tour together last fall know that they have a kind of rock 'n' roll synergy that most full-time band members don't even share. That kinetic chemistry is arguably what makes Afraid of Ghosts as perfect as it is. After all, one of the best things about this record is how incredibly great it sounds, from first note to last. Walker, of course, is a heavyweight producer in his own right, but on this record, he handed over the reigns to Adams. The result is a disc that is instantly unique in his catalog, distinct from the already-diverse range of albums he's made in the past. Adams brings a different sonic atmosphere to a set of songs that needed it, trading what might have been a cleaner production job from Walker for something more akin to the grimy, reverb-heavy sheen that characterized his self-titled solo album from last year. And like that record, this one feels instantly timeless.

Similarly to how Ryan Adams hearkened back to the golden days of Tom Petty and Fleetwood Mac, Afraid of Ghosts would be right at home in a stack of 1970s folk-leaning records: Carole King's Tapestry; anything by James Taylor; even a few albums that fall more into the "rock" genre, like George Harrison's All Things Must Pass or Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town. Part of it, of course, is that these are just great songs; another part is the arrangements, which add splashes of glorious instrumental color—the scorched-earth guitar solo in "Bed on Fire," the wall of radiant vocal hums in "Still Drunk," the twinkling pianos of the title track, and the haunting synths of album closer "The Dark"—to songs that could have easily been grayscale acoustic affairs. And just as Ryan Adams accomplished a rebirth of sorts on his recent self-titled record, Afraid of Ghosts manages to stay true to Walker's legacy while also standing out as something distinctly new and different in his catalog.

There will probably never come a day when I can rank any Butch Walker album above Letters. Not only was that the first Butch record I ever heard, and not only did it play a huge part in my own musical evolution, but it also balanced everything that makes Butch Walker special into one album: big rock songs, soaring power pop choruses, and sarcastic quips on one side; sparse arrangements, tender storytelling, and raw intimate balladry on the other side. Afraid of Ghosts is the first album from Butch that doesn't include any of the former, which will probably alienate a few longtime fans. But for those who are willing to go in without preconceived notions, this album is a masterpiece: a stunning feat of songwriting depth, emotional maturity, and melodic effortlessness that stands as one of the best albums to come out in years.

It's also the album that Butch needed to make right now, an elegy for a lost parent that, by its final lyric, has poetically reached the acceptance stage: "Into the dark," Butch sings, "With my father at my side." It's a fitting statement, because the people we love most—parents, grandparents, family members, best friends—they're never gone. They can't ever be gone because they live in us. They live on in the things we do, and in the songs we write. And the fact that Big Butch lives on in this remarkable LP, this staggering work of heartbreak and celebration, that's the greatest compliment that could ever be paid to the loving son who wrote it. Condolences to everyone else, but 2015 already has its Album of the Year.

Butch Walker - Peachtree Battle

“I just remember my dad flew out to see me and first thing he got off the plane, I’d never seen him cry, and he just started crying. And it was a big moment for me because I could see he was proud of having a boy who could wipe his own ass and make his own way. And ever since then, I wanted his respect, no matter how I looked and how I dressed. So I tried to make him proud after that, and many, many years later and many failed attempts later and different bands and trying to be successful, and failing, he always had my back after that, and he would give me his only twenty dollars in his pocket and say ‘let’s go get some beer and hug it out.' And...this is for him.”

-Butch Walker, dedicating a song to his father at a recent concert

Over the past week, I’ve written ten reviews spanning ten different records from Butch Walker, my favorite living songwriter—or at very least, a guy I consider tied with Bruce Springsteen for that title. I’ve covered solo albums, full-band records, and side projects, and I’ve written about nearly every song that Walker has written in the past 15 years. I did it in some 16,000 words, in a feature I called “Butch Walker Week,” and for those who have made the journey with me—and survived that hefty word count to get to here, no less—I thank you for your attention. It’s been an adventure, to say the least, a walk through some of my favorite songs of all time and through records that have shaped my life since I first stumbled upon Letters eight and a half years ago. And today I reach the end—or hopefully, the middle—of Walker’s catalog with a new EP called Peachtree Battle, which releases to digital outlets today. Suffice to say, it feels like a good place to pause the music, lay down my pencil—er...laptop keyboard—and reflect. This album, I think, is a culmination.

For whatever unfair reason, great art—music especially—is often birthed from heartbreak and great personal suffering. Bob Dylan once wrote that “behind every beautiful thing, there’s been some kind of pain,” and while that statement is a bit reductive so as to fit the poetry of a folk song, it rings particularly true when it comes to music. When artists air their grievances through song and let us see them bleed, the result is transcendently powerful. It takes their suffering and makes it ours, reflects our own broken hearts back at us through the songs, and in the process, renders the music timeless. So many artists over the course of music history have proven this to be true, and Butch Walker is one of the most brilliant examples. As I’m sure I’ve made abundantly clear to anyone who has followed this long, meandering journey through his work with me over the past week, there are things I love about every Butch Walker record. I love the sweaty, carefree rock ‘n’ roll of The Spade, the folk-meets-Beatles-pop experimentation of I Liked You Better When You Had No Heart, and the glammed-up time machine of The Rise and Fall of Butch Walker and the Let’s-Go-Out-Tonites! They’re all great works.

But the albums that have stuck with me the longest are the introspective ones. 2004’s Letters was a break-up album for the ages, full of yearning verses and viscerally emotional choruses about love gone wrong, while 2008’s Sycamore Meadows caught Walker at another reflective moment after he lost his house and every material possession he’d ever owned in a California wildfire. Sure, both albums found me at important times in my life—Letters as I was first falling in love with music and Sycamore Meadows as endings and goodbyes started to rain down on me during my senior year of high school—but it was the emotion in the songs, put there by Walker and derived from his own loss and hurt, that has allowed them to resonate in my heart for so long.

I bring this all up here because Peachtree Battle is absolutely cut from the same cloth as those two masterful discs. Written and recorded in the months and weeks leading up to the death of Butch’s father—“Big Butch” passed away on August 21, a week before Peachtree Battle’s first single went out to the press—Peachtree Battle is reflective, heartbreaking, and celebratory in all the right ways. Following his father’s passing, Butch tweeted “You never become a man until you lose your dad. Rest In Peace “Big” Butch Walker I love you so much.” In 140 characters, Butch’s grief poured forth, and it does the same thing throughout these five songs and these 18 and a half minutes. It’s all too brief, of course, just like the lives of the people we love always seem to be, but while I so wanted this to be a full-length, it’s impossible to argue with Butch’s reasoning for keeping it an EP: he wanted his father to hear these songs in their finalized versions before he said goodbye, and we can’t blame him for that because they constitute one of the most beautiful farewells ever expressed through music.

Peachtree Battle also accomplishes in five tracks what really no other Butch Walker record has been able to do in 10 or 12, and that is to offer a retrospective look back at all of the sonic territory that Butch has traveled since he commenced his solo career in 2002. The blissful power pop of Letters is back on “Coming Home,” the set’s bittersweet first single. With its beat-heavy production and triumphant chorus, “Coming Home” sounds like it could be an absolute smash in the post-fun. version of mainstream pop music. It won’t get to radio, just because Dangerbird—Walker’s label—doesn’t have the resources to get it there, but its appeal is far-reaching nonetheless. “Favorite Son” is another earworm, with a glammy falsetto groove that wouldn’t have been out of place on The Rise and Fall and the same easygoing summertime flare that so defined The Spade, while the rousing lead-off track, the menacing classic rock rave-up of “I’ve Been Waiting For This,” has the same crowd sing-along potential that songs like “When the Canyons Ruled the City” and “3 Kids in Brooklyn” have always carried with ease.

But while Peachtree Battle feels like a “greatest hits, new songs” package on a sonic level, it is ultimately defined by its lyrical content. The wistful title track—which Butch premiered for the first time at the live show I saw in August—burns with a steel guitar ache and a chorus that describes, in perfect fashion, the pain of moving on when someone important has departed from our lives. “It gets hard to share the same streets I shared with you, hard to wipe the places from my mind,” Walker sings, an intimate and minimalistic layer of folk production bringing out every weather-worn pang in his voice. “Maybe I’ll discard it when I finish what I started, then I’ll know: wherever you are, that’s my home.” It’s a tearful ballad, and Butch’s decision to dial back the production makes all the difference in just how hard it hits.

“Let It Go Where’s It’s Supposed To,” the set’s grand finale, hits every bit as hard, building through a backwoods country-folk arrangement to a bridge that boasts the record’s most revealing lines. “Now that I’m a man myself and my father’s bones are turning into dust/I got a boy to raise through hell and just pray he turns out half the man he was,” Butch sings during the momentary break, the song’s Allman Brothers guitar scratch chugging away beneath him. “When you grow and think you’ve seen it all, nothing will prepare the fall/Please just take these words before I’m gone.” Moments later, the song explodes into its final chorus, a celebratory reverie loaded with handclaps and classic rock guitar sounds, and it takes me back to the first time I heard the song, at Chicago’s Bottom Lounge this past New Years Eve.

That night, early on in the show and vamping on a simple guitar riff, Butch borrowed a band member’s phone to call his parents. When his dad answered on speakerphone—with a simple, “hey buddy”—the crowd erupted in cheers of approval, and after Butch Sr. had wished the entire crowd a Happy New Year, Butch Jr. launched into a rousing take on “Let It Go Where It’s Supposed To.” It was a moment of laughter and connection for a father and son that, for many years, didn’t see eye to eye, and it was such a pleasure to see the happiness in Butch’s eyes as he made that call and played that song. Now that Butch Sr. has passed, it would be easy to see “Let It Go” and the rest of Peachtree Battle as sad songs, but I don’t think that description does this record justice. These songs are about love, resilience, catharsis, and celebration, and even though it’s hard not to wish there were about five more of them—if the strength of this material is any indication, a full-length Peachtree Battle would have easily stood alongside Letters and Sycamore Meadows as Butch’s best work—it’s equally hard to find fault with them.

Butch Walker and the Black Widows - The Spade

After the release of and tour for 2010’s good-but-not-great I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart, Butch Walker’s first album with a new backing band called the Black Widows, a few things happened. First, Walker was signed to Dangerbird records, which, after years of flitting between bona-fide major labels, indie imprints, and numerous independent start-up labels, finally seemed like the natural place for him. Second, the guys in the Black Widows were having so much fun touring with Butch (and writing songs together) that the majority of them decided to cut a new record. The resulting album, 2011’s The Spade, was the fastest turnaround between Butch Walker albums since the first two Marvelous 3 records. Walker, songwriting partner Michael Trent, bassist Jake Sinclair, and guitarists Fran Capitanelli and Chris Unck recorded The Spade in the space of a week in the early summer of 2011. Drummer Darren Dodd was gone, off to start a new band, and I never did hear what happened to keyboardist Wes Flowers, but the guys who stuck around were the key players anyway, and from the first time I streamed The Spade’s first single—a kinetic rush of a rock song called “Summer of ’89”—I knew that Butch was back on track.

If I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart was a fussed-over, meticulous winter album full of expansive vocal harmonies, lilting melodies, and wistful lyrics, then The Spade is the complete opposite side of the coin, a loud, raucous, messy, and spontaneous rock ‘n’ roll album meant to be played at full volume during the summer months. Right from the first moments of the record, where a blistering electric guitar breaks the silence on “Bodegas and Blood,” it’s clear that The Spade is a thoroughly different beast from its predecessor. The record hits the ground running and doesn’t slow down for the entirety of side one, flitting from shout-along rock song (“Every Single Body Else”) to shout-along rock song (“Sweethearts”).

“Summer of ‘89” immediately takes its place in the pantheon of great Butch Walker songs, with an anthemic “woah oh” refrain and a nostalgic spoken-word bridge section that transports us back to Butch’s youth, back to when he was playing rock shows and living life in the fast lane before even getting out of high school. As for the chorus, an explosive inquiry of “Can I go back to when I was a winner?/Way before the rain came and washed away the sinners,” it’s the kind of incendiary proclamation that can and should immortalize songs on summer playlists for years after they’ve stopped sounding shiny and new. Why the tune wasn’t blasting from every car radio in the country during the summer of 2011 is unanswerable, but for me at least, it will always remain a staple.

“Day Drunk” is every bit as good, a celebratory (and somewhat premature) farewell song that Butch wrote for his father. “It’s the most perfect time and the weather’s perfection/To watch as my father battles infection,” Butch sings during the verse, all building to a cathartic high-rise chorus built out of nothing more than the word “goodbye.” Fran Capitanelli gets the MVP award for the song (and frankly, for the record) with a gorgeous spiderweb of an outro guitar solo. My biggest problem with I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart was that it felt more like an overt piece of studio art than an actual rock ‘n’ roll album. Butch had just built a new studio, and that album was the sound of him breaking it in. Everything sounds far more organic on The Spade, and as Walker’s wordless wails rip through Capitanelli’s beautiful latticework of guitar during the final minute of “Day Drunk,” it’s clear that this is how the Black Widows were built to sound. Anyone who had seen them on the tour for the previous album already knew that, of course, but it was nice to see it realized on record.

Another problem that I had with I Liked It Better... was that, because Butch brought Michael Trent on board to co-write roughly half of the songs, it didn’t really sound like a Butch Walker album—at least not in the way that I had come to expect Butch Walker albums to sound. The Spade solves that problem, though not in the way I would have expected. Rather than ditching Trent, Walker goes full-speed in the other direction, inviting every member of the band to contribute writing ideas. This time around, there are actually songs where Butch doesn’t even get writing credits at all--a first, I think, for any album he had ever been a part of. The relentless ricochet of “Every Single Body Else” sounds more like a Chris Unck song than a Butch Walker one, with the former actually taking lead vocal duties for the majority of the song, while the swooning eighties pop of “Synthesizers” (a modern-day rewrite of “Come On, Eileen”) is patent Butch Walker—a remarkable feat considering the fact that it was a songwriting collaboration between Michael Trent and Jake Sinclair. The two former bandmates join together to construct something far catchier and more accessible than any of the songs they penned for the Films (their previous band), and the sarcastic lyrics and classic pure pop feel of “Synthesizers” posit it as this album’s most mainstream moment.

But while his Black Widows prove to be more accomplished writers and musicians on this record than they did on the first, Butch still takes center stage enough times to prove that he’s still one of the music industry’s foremost songwriting craftsmen. The three songs that come exclusively from Walker’s pen—“Summer of ‘89”, “Dublin Crow,” and “Closest Thing to You I’m Gonna Find”—are three of the best on the record, and all of them hit harder than anything on the last album. The late-album country-folk suite of “Dublin Crow” and “Closest Thing” is the most at home Walker has sounded on record since Sycamore Meadows. The former, a rambunctious slice of Irish folk-pop, loaded with communal handclaps and overflowing gang vocal harmonies, feels like an off-the-cuff street performance piece, while the latter borrows some of the anthemic sweep of career highlight, “When the Canyons Ruled the City” (from 2006’s The Rise and Fall of Butch Walker and the Let’s-Go-Out-Tonites!), for a song that has justifiably earned status as a Walker live show staple. Building from dusky back porch folk to rafter-raising southern rock—and using some terrific, weather-worn country music lyrics as the bridge between the two styles (“So I keep another night by this fire and drink some wine/It’s the closest thing to you I’m gonna find,” Butch sings in the first chorus refrain)—“Closest Thing” is the kind of sonic niche I would love to hear Butch build an entire album around.

But The Spade is neither a country record nor a collection of folk songs, and that’s made fundamentally clear by the way that the album concludes. The last two tracks unleash the loudest, most rip-roaring rock ‘n’ roll Walker has ever committed to tape. The tongue-in-cheek closing track, called “Sucker Punch,” was written after Butch was conked out by a drunk at a bar in Los Angeles, and serves as a particularly raucous finale to a particularly raucous album. On the live stage, the song reaches new heights, playing host to an epic electric guitar battle between Fran Capitanelli and Walker himself that crosses half a dozen genres, from Walker’s beloved hair metal to the song’s obvious Skynyrd-esque roots.

The penultimate track, however, is where The Spade reaches the apex of everything it’s supposed to be. “Bullet Belt” is a remarkably potent rock song, bursting with the kind of energy we hadn’t heard on a Butch Walker album in half a decade. From Jake Sinclair’s booming bass foundation to the relentless runaway train of a chorus, this paean to undying youth, massive nights, and bad decisions sounds utterly flammable from first note to last. It’s the kind of song that demands to be played at full volume, whether blasting from a stereo at an out-of-hand house party or ringing from the stage in the final moments of live show--a fact that makes it all the more upsetting that Butch has never played the song live. When this record first came out, I said to myself, “Well I don’t care what the setlist for the upcoming tour looks like, as long as ‘Bullet Belt’ is on it.” At the show I saw that October, the Black Widows played every single song on The Spade except “Bullet Belt,” leading me to believe that either Butch was reading my blog and wanted to spite me or didn’t feel like shredding his voice on the skyscraping chorus. Either way, “Bullet Belt” may well be the greatest live showstopper to never appear in a concert setlist, and I’m hoping that Butch corrects that error someday soon. I’m not holding my breath.

The Spade is not Butch Walker’s best album. Compared with the seminal masterpieces he released between 2004 and 2008, this album sounds positively minor, a gap record filled with quirky rock songs to fill the time in between more serious and weighty works of art. With that said, though, I adore The Spade. It’s one of my absolute favorite albums of the decade so far, and I don’t think Butch has made a more immediate or downright fun album in his entire career. The record dropped at the wrong time—the release date fell at the end of August, the day I drove back to college after a great summer in my hometown—and probably derailed its own chances of being a go-to summer soundtrack for a lot of people that year as a result. But for how much I played this album throughout the remainder of 2011, that fact hardly even mattered. From road-trip sing-alongs to celebratory rock shows, these songs have never failed to put a smile on my face, and while I like Butch best in his more balladic, introspective territory, I wouldn’t mind the Black Widows coming out of the woodwork every couple of years for the rest of his career if the albums they create together are going to be half as exciting as this one.

Butch Walker and the Black Widows - I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart

When Butch Walker released Sycamore Meadows in 2008, it felt like both a new beginning for and the end of an era. Walker’s house had burned to the ground the year before, and he spent the songs on Sycamore reinventing his sound and injecting more and more layers of classic rock, folk Americana, and country twang into his writing than ever before. The result was arguably his best record, but for those who had followed Butch from the Marvelous 3 days, or jumped aboard with his early solo power pop albums, hearing him as he got older, wiser, and softer was somewhat of a bittersweet transformation. The shows on the Sycamore Meadows tour were still as rafter-raising and life-affirming as ever, but they couldn’t mask the feeling I had that Sycamore was the ending of the southern California trilogy that had kicked off with Letters and continued with The Rise and Fall. Where Letters was an album about falling in love and falling apart on the west coast, and where much of Rise was concerned with the cathartic and communal backdrop of the L.A. party scene, Sycamore left the ashes of Butch’s life in Malibu, on the street where he used to live, and no matter how good the music sounded, there was no denying that the man behind it had changed. He was looking for something new.

Butch found that “something new” in the form of a backing band called the Black Widows. While his previous four records had all supposedly been “solo albums,” Butch was never the kind of guy to pull a Billy Corgan and record every instrument by himself (though he easily could have done just that). Take a look through the album credits of each Walker solo record, and you will always a substantial list of players, many of which overlap from one album to the next. Butch also only intermittently plays acoustic shows, even though much of his music lends itself particularly well to sparse orchestration. Quite simply, ever since he built up the courage to step up to the microphone in the wake of the Southgang days, Butch has been a purebred frontman at heart, and while, in 2010, he hadn’t had a consistent band at his back since the Marvelous 3 days, it was hardly surprising when he brought together a slate of musicians, both new and old, to be his “Black Widows.”

One of those musicians was Fran Capitanelli, a guitarist who had played on Letters and joined back up with Butch for the Sycamore Meadows tour. Another was Darren Dodd, who had arrived for The Rise and Fall and played drums with Walker’s 1969 side project as well. Keyboardist Wes Flowers had also appeared on Rise, while multi-instrumentalist Chris Unck was new to Butch’s recording team, but had been there for the Sycamore Meadows tour, memorably adding a layer of lap steel wistfulness to “Best Thing You Never Had.”

But the key members of the Black Widows—and the guys who would most heavily influence the next stage of Butch’s career—were the latest additions. In 2009, as Butch flitted from one side of the country to the other on the Sycamore Meadows tour, he brought along a pop-glam act called the Films to open for him. He was in the process of producing the band’s new album—a solid set of songs called Oh Scorpio, which dropped later that year—and since the Films fit pretty well into Butch’s kind of scene anyway, they made for an effective opener. It’s unclear now whether or not the Films still exist as a band, but Butch more or less stole two of their members for his own. The first, bassist Jake Sinclair, has pretty much become Butch’s protege, assisting with the studio work for the latest Fall Out Boy album (he was the primary engineer for the record) and sticking around for this year’s Peachtree Battle tour, even as the rest of the Black Widows have seemingly gone their separate ways.

The second new guy, Films frontman Michael Trent, was never actually a full-time member of the Black Widows, but still became Butch’s songwriting partner around the time I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart was gestating. He gets co-writing credits on half the album’s songs, and the result is a record that is immeasurably different from anything Walker had ever made before. In the three and a half years since the album first graced my ears, I’ve gone back and forth on how I feel about I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart. On one hand, it’s got my favorite title of any Butch Walker record (and one of my favorite album titles period). On the other, it just doesn’t really feel like a Butch Walker record to me, at least not in the sense that the albums in the SoCal trilogy did, and it was the first album of his that I did not crown as my album of the year as a result.

Part of the reason is that I Liked It Better... can’t quite decide what it wants to be. Trent brings a passion for vaudevillian Beatles pop to the table, and many of the songs he co-writes, from the gorgeous orchestral explosion of “Pretty Melody”—the album’s most readymade pop single—to the Rubber Soul/Revolver-era McCartney swirl of “House of Cards,” add candy-coated dimensions to Walker’s songwriting that had only been hinted at once or twice on The Rise and Fall. Meanwhile, Butch seems more interested in continuing to pursue the country and folk sounds he had so thoroughly focused on with Sycamore Meadows, and songs like “Canadian Ten,” a dusky piece of alt-country awash in vocal harmonies, and “She Likes Hair Bands,” a southern-pop-rock rave-up that sounds tailor-made for a live sing-along, force a sort of disconnect in the overall cohesion the record. Sycamore Meadows and The Rise and Fall were great albums partially because they were able to distill myriad genres, moods, and directions into collections of songs that were greater than the sums of their already great parts. I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart still holds together as a record, but it doesn’t have the kind of ebb and flow that Butch’s best albums do.

Why is that? Quite simply, I Liked It Better When Had No Heart isn’t the parade of near-perfect songs that its three predecessors were. There’s no anthem like “Closer to the Truth and Further from the Sky” or “When the Canyons Ruled the City” here, no chilling ballad as stratospheric as “Don’t Move” or “Stateline.” Instead, the album highlights are songs like “Trash Day,” the lilting piece of societal commentary that kicks off the disc, or “Days/Months/Years” a tongue-in-cheek, Johnny Cash-referencing rocker that absolutely should be a live show staple. Neither stand up to Walker’s best work. Meanwhile, beautiful acoustic ballads like “Don’t You Think Someone Should Take You Home” and “Be Good Until Then” have long been my personal favorite songs from the album, even though I think both sound a bit too clean and airbrushed for the musical styles they reflect. I first heard “Don’t You Think Someone Should Take You Home” on an audience bootleg, and I fell in love with the muggy atmosphere that the fuzzy recording built out of Walker’s voice, his acoustic guitar, and an ever-present layer of Chris Unck’s lap steel. On record, that muggy summer night feeling is gone, and while the song is still wonderful, it doesn’t have the devastating ache that could transport the song to the next level.

“Be Good Until Then,” on the other hand, is no more than a hushed lullaby that Butch wrote for his son. The lyrics are simple and beautiful (“All these things will mean more when I’m gone, just be good until then,” Butch sings in the chorus, a line that feels all the more heartwrenching now that he has lost his own father), but I’ve never felt that the live version allowed the emotion in Walker’s voice to really come to the forefront. Butch is a world-class producer, and by this point in his career, he was rightfully in-demand by all sectors of the music industry. But on I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart, I have always felt like he over-produced his own vocals a bit, and the result is that, on close-to-home songs like “Be Good Until Then,” we don’t get the kind of goosebump-inducing moments that were so prevalent on Letters and Sycamore Meadows. It’s a small complaint—the song still sounds great, after all—but it’s one of the reasons why this album isn’t as near and dear to my heart as virtually everything else in Butch’s discography.

All criticisms aside, I really do enjoy I Liked You Better When You Had No Heart. I love the glammy synth groove of “They Don’t Know What We Know” and how it brings the album into its final act so brilliantly. I love the expansive vocal harmonies that open up during the break of the beautifully melancholic “Stripped Down Version.” I love the rollicking sensibility of “Temporary Title,” a song that splits the album down the middle between the lyrical grace of “Canadian Ten” (“I told myself ‘don’t fall in love if you don’t know their name’/But my eyes are straight wired to my heart and bypass my brain”) and the hand-clap grandiosity of “She Likes Hair Bands.” And I love the pure old-fashioned pop feel “Pretty Melody” and how much fun Butch seems to have while singing that song (he kicks the tar out of it, too). There’s a lot to adore here, and from pretty much any other artist, I think this album would be a high watermark. The fact that it’s the weakest “solo” record Walker ever made is almost moot. Tonally, it’s unique from everything else he’s done, a winterish album filled with chilly landscapes and wandering arrangements, taking Butch’s past pop and folk sounds in new directions while still retaining a few moments that are definitively “him.” The Black Widows would become more tightly-knit on the next album, and the career high period of the SoCal trilogy was clearly over, but I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart showed just how unpredictable Butch Walker could be, and even if I don’t love the result, it’s still nice to see his versatility on display.

Butch Walker - Sycamore Meadows

“I’m not happy with myself these days, I took the best parts of the script and I made them all cliche/And this red bandana’s surely gonna fade, even though it’s the only thing the fire didn’t take.” Butch Walker sings those lines on “Going Back/Going Home,” one of the standout tracks from his fourth solo studio album, 2008’s Sycamore Meadows. That’s not a metaphorical fire, either. In November 2007, Walker lost his Malibu home, along with every guitar he’d ever owned and every master tape of every song he’d ever recorded, in a vicious assault of California wildfires. Pieces of recording equipment, cars, motorcycles, family heirlooms, photographs from happier times—they all turned to ashes on November 24 of that year. Luckily, Butch and his family were on tour in New York and no one was hurt, but the songwriter was suddenly cut adrift from all material possessions, forced to start over. The L.A. party of his previous record, 2006’s The Rise and Fall of Butch Walker and the Let’s-Go-Out-Tonites!, was more than over: it was a distant memory, a piece of another life. In his first public statement following the fire, Butch said “I feel like I finally know the difference between ‘going back’ and ‘going home.’” It wouldn’t be long before he would channel that sentiment into a song and album that were arguably career-defining moments for him.

The way Butch tells it in his 2011 memoir, Drinking with Strangers, the fire came along and shook him awake. Throughout the fall of 2007, the artist had been taking advantage of social media (remember Myspace?) to disseminate some of his latest demos to fans. Boy, was this new stuff sounding great. I remember coming home from school on the first or second day of my junior year of high school and logging into my email or Facebook or some other source that told me Butch had posted a new song. When I started listening, I was blown away: this particular tune was a slow, somber, and emotional piano ballad that I immediately thought was one of the best songs he had ever written. The power in his voice, the sparse arrangement, it reminded me of the first time I had heard Letters, and I couldn’t wait to see what Butch Walker had in store for his new record. That song was “ATL,” which would become the closing track on Sycamore Meadows a year later when the album finally made it to official release. And it wasn’t the only song that Butch premiered to fans online that fall. One day, the after-school discovery was a chiming ode to two lovers losing their connection; another week, it was a raucous rock ‘n’ roll track played on a 12-string guitar; and a fourth song sounded like it had potential to be Butch’s next big shot at mainstream radio. Those songs, “Vessels,” “3 Kids in Brooklyn,” and “Here Comes The...,” were all terrific, and the more I heard, the more I though that Butch might have his best album on his hands.

Apparently, though, Butch wasn’t feeling the same way. Despite the constant surge of great material that was finding its way to his Myspace page that fall, the songwriter claims he was struggling with writer’s block at the time and was having trouble finishing songs at all, let alone writing about anything meaningful. He was still touring and putting on a brave face, though, and from how great the shows were sounding, it would have been hard for anyone to notice that something was wrong. On November 23, 2007, Butch took the stage at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, New Jersey to play a slew of new songs in an intimate and acoustic setting. During the show’s standout moment, a chilling take on another recent Myspace demo called “Ships in a Bottle,” Butch bled emotion onto the stage, singing the song’s chorus like it was all he had left:

I don’t want to know if there’s another part of me, don’t want to feel if I’m alive
Don’t want to smell the bed where you used to sleep, I’m gonna miss it again
I just want to walk away from the ashes, and take the fact that I’ve been burned
And maybe let you know I’m still standing, and if you miss it again, I’m around.

It was prophetic and ironic in the cruelest sense. One night, those were just lines in another heart-wrenching break-up song. The next day, Butch’s life was ashes and he had been burned. Suddenly, everything had changed. No one was talking about a new album or a world tour. Everyone was just wondering just how much Butch had lost in that fire, both quantifiable and unquantifiable, and what our favorite songwriter was going to look like when he finished digging through the wreckage.

It would be almost an entire year before Sycamore Meadows—named after the street where Butch’s house had once stood—would finally arrive, but when it did, it was worth the wait. For me, it was also a confusing release, though. By the time Sycamore Meadows arrived, I had heard 10 of the 12 songs already, either as Myspace demos or live recordings from the only shows Butch had played that entire year (he cancelled his “one man band” tour with Jesse Malin to re-record Sycamore Meadows from scratch, but still played a pair of Atlanta dates). When you’ve been listening to raw versions of songs for months at a time, it’s hard to get on board with the more fleshed out studio versions, and that was the case for me with Sycamore Meadows, at least for the first few days. Some of the songs—“3 Kids” and “Vessels,” in particular—hadn’t changed much, and actually really benefited from a bit of extra studio work. They’re still two of my favorite Butch songs, the former because it’s arguably Butch’s best live song, the latter because it distills heartbreak so thoroughly into a single line: “we don’t get along anymore.”

Other songs got more dramatic transformations that felt more jarring. “Ships in a Bottle” was one that took me a long time to really enjoy on record, simply because I had listened to it so many times as a blisteringly emotional acoustic song that I thought hearing it covered in horns, pianos, 1970s electric guitar tones, and back-up vocals lessened the impact of the lyrics or Butch’s vocal delivery. (It didn’t.) Nowadays, I adore both versions of “Ships in a Bottle,” but I also understand that the full-band studio recording is a much better sonic match with the rest of Sycamore Meadows, which is a lively, organic, and fascinating record, as loaded with interesting musical textures as any record in the Butch catalog. Back then, though, I needed some time to adjust, and as a result, I really spent a lot of time with the songs that were actually new to me.

One of those was “The Weight of Her,” which I had technically heard prior to the album’s release, but not in a live or acoustic version (it was the first single). To this day, “The Weight of Her” remains my favorite opening track on any Butch record, thanks to a chorus that deftly balances power pop with the folk and Americana influences that were introduced on the last record. I like to think of Sycamore Meadows as Butch’s “classic singer songwriter” record. Walker makes some very obvious tributes to his major idols throughout this record, and those result in a collection of songs that feel wonderfully varied without ever sacrificing a cohesive feel. For example, one of the album’s ballads, the electric-piano-and-drum-machine slow-burn of “Passed Your Place, Saw Your Car, Thought of You” is a dead-ringer for My Aim is True-era Elvis Costello. Similarly, “The Weight of Her” is Butch’s attempt to write a feel-good rock song in the vein of Tom Petty’s 1977 classic, “American Girl.” Needless to say, it works.

The other major 1970s influence at play here appears on penultimate barnstormer, “Closer to the Truth and Further from the Sky,” which rapidly became my go-to favorite song on Sycamore Meadows. For awhile, I couldn’t put my finger on precisely why I loved the song so much, I just knew that I couldn’t stop listening to it while I drove around my hometown that year as fall turned to winter. I felt like this was a different kind of song for Butch, falling somewhere between classic heartland rock and age-old folk music traditions; I knew that couplets like “Roadside venue all papered in menus in a town that forgot its own name/We were hungry for anything that had a pulse as we freed ourselves from the rain” sounded timeless, even from the first time they drifted over my iPod headphones and stopped me in my tracks; and I knew that the song’s chorus was arguably the best, most anthemic thing that Butch had ever written.

The more time I spent with the song, the more obvious the inspiration behind it became: we’d had a Petty song and a Costello song, and now here was Butch attempting at a Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run or Darkness on the Edge of Town-style anthem. On record, Butch removed the drums, leaving it more stripped down than we expect an epic, tear-down-the-walls hymn to sound. It doesn’t matter: “Closer to the Truth” remains a pulse-pounding and life-affirming song that stands as a “Badlands” or a “Born to Run” for a modern age. When I first heard it, I wasn’t the Bruce fan I am now, but “Closer to the Truth” made me look closer. A month later, I was diving headfirst into Springsteen’s back catalog and the rest is history. For those that know me around these parts, that says a lot about how big a role this song played in my life, and it remains my favorite part of this album.

Listening back as I write these words, with iTunes play counts of “100” or more staring at me from every song on this record, I can’t believe I ever had reservations about Butch’s production and instrumentation choices. Sure, “ATL” gets a heavier layer of reverb than the demo had, but the resulting product is only more haunting and ghostly as a result. And yeah, “Here Comes The...” didn’t need a Pink guest feature, but who can fault that decision when it earned Butch some well-deserved mainstream attention? (Pink also deserves to be on this record, if only because she met Butch at the ruins of his old house with a gorgeous Gibson Les Paul.) Elsewhere, older songs were either built up (“Summer Scarves,” a wistful and melancholic tune which evolved from an early electric guitar solo song into a full-band number with an unorthodox oboe intro) or left sparse (“Song for the Metalheads,” an acoustic guitar/harmonica ditty where Walker memorably croons, “the record business is fucked, and it’s kind of funny”), while another brand-new song (“Ponce De Leon Ave.”) added some percussive, Prince-flavored funk-pop into the middle of the album to mix things.

But even despite all of its wonderful new directions and beautifully refined twists on the older ones, Sycamore Meadows always comes back around to one song and that’s “Going Back/Going Home.” The first thing that Butch wrote after the fire, the song that broke the ice of his alleged writer’s block and convinced him that he had something to say again, something to prove, “Going Back/Going Home” is, I think, the song from this record that remains nearest and dearest to Butch’s heart. To this day, he plays it at every live show, always making jokes about fucking up the “rap” section—halfway through the song, he does an entire, spoken-word recap of his life and his trials and tribulations in the music industry, all in less than a minute and a half—and always inspiring massive cheers when he sings the final couple of lines: “Every time I come back in this town I know/That I finally know the difference between going back and going home.”

“Going Back/Going Home” is a bittersweet song, not just because of the personal meaning it has to Butch, but also just because the lyrics paint portraits of people leaving behind something broken to start anew (“She tells her song she did the best she could as she buries dad/Maybe he’ll grow up to be a man, unlike his father did,” Butch sings in one of the verses). Regardless though, the ultimate impact of “Going Back/Going Home” is a hopeful and resilient one. The triumphant guitar riff, punctuated here by sparkling bells and a simple acoustic chord progression, feels like a rise from the ashes, and that’s really what this album is all about. Upon release, many—myself included—were ready to call Sycamore Meadows a sequel of sorts to Letters, but I no longer think that’s the case. This record is its own beast: a similar blend of loud and soft, sarcastic and serious, introspective and forward-thinking, to be sure, but with an entirely different musical palette and a mood that—despite the broken resignation of “ATL” and “Voice and Piano,” the album’s dream sequence of a hidden track—feels far more interested in leaving the past behind than languishing in it. Letters will always be my favorite Butch Walker album, largely because of when it first came into my life, but Sycamore Meadows is a damn-near perfect record on its own, and, because of what it meant to Butch, arguably the most “important” work of his career. It’s got “classic” written all over it.