Hopefully by now a regular reader will have seen this guys name pop up a couple of times on this site. He is one of my top artists/musicians and one of the few people I own practically all the albums of.  From his early days in hair metal band Southgang, through his power pop punk days in Marvelous3 and early solo career. The indie rock side project 1969 and the Americana folk or his last solo offering, he has an album for every mood.

Having done a few bits for this site, using my contacts and calling in a favour, I asked head honcho Jules  to track down a promo copy of Butch’s latest, forthcoming album, The Spade. It was a week or two later when Jules emailed me with the bad news…’Sorry, cant get hold of one…’ it said.  With a little disappointment, I read on…. ‘but how about an hour with the guy to make up for it?’ Maybe not the bad news mail I first thought! Maybe just the best darn email I could have got!

So up to London I went and here is the outcome….well part one atleast:

How did you find making the new record?

It came together really easy and we were really happy with how kinda effortless this one was.  The last one was effortless too, but it was just cos we’d come off the road and gone right into the studio, we were kinda already a well oiled machine.  Interestingly enough it’s weird to say there were no snags on either one so I’m pretty happy with that but on the last one I was worried about that.  I’ve always had this weird phobia that if you don’t toil over something and it’s not just completely painstaking to do then no ones gonna like it and it sucks and we did the last record in 5 days and I was like no ones gonna like this record.  But it turned out that everybody seemed to really like it that had bought my records (in the past) and I was happy about that.  This time we kinda took the same approach but didn’t really have the songs (written in advance).

So did you write whilst you were on tour and then after the tour finished you have tracks all ready to go and just bash them out in the studio?

This one I didn’t have much.  I had some lyric ideas here and there maybe 2 or 3 finished songs and just kinda put it all in the pot and got in there and it was a very collaborative effort.

So all the other guys chip in?

Yeah everybody. And that’s the other thing too they all bought songs in which I’d never done before and I loved it!   To me it feels like… I know everybody says their newest record is their best record but I feel as if I’m just getting good at this.   I’ve made what I feel to be some ok music in the past but this is a good band record.

You’ve got The Black Widows/Lets Go Out Tonights and some of your solo records have just been Butch Walker is that because they come in to help write so get the tag? Is that how it works?

Yeah well this thing happened to be a band for the last few years with the same line up so we ended up developing a sound just from touring.  Each person had their own identity so by default it just ended up sounding a certain way that never existed on any of my other records.  It didn’t seem right to just call it a solo record.

But it’s a different drummer on this album is it?

It’s a guy named Patrick Keeler who’s in The Raconteurs and plays with Jack White and some other bands.  He played on the record and he’s in like 5 different bands so I don’t even know if he’ll be able to tour the same time we will but I’m not worried about that, I was just glad to have him be a Widow on the record.  He was super stoked on it, him and Brendon Benson and all those other guys would come to our shows whenever we were in Nashville and we became motorcycle buddies and we would ride whenever they came up to California.  He was coming back from Australia cos he also has a band called The Greenhornes and he was like ’I’ve got a month off I’d love to come to California and ride motorcycles and write music’ and I said we’re making a new record so that’s perfect.

You used the same drummer for quite a while before though didn’t you?

Darren? Yeah he’s in a band called Ponderosa, kinda like a southern rock band out of Atlanta that I’ve taken on tour as support.  They’re our buddies and Darren has always played with them and they got popular and they got signed to New West Records and I think he had to make a decision.  I was like, “Dude you’ve spent 6 years with me, if your torn then just go.”

I suppose a regular job would be better for him, than the bits here and there and what ever comes in with you I suppose.

It was nice because I felt like it was time to make a change.

To bring new ideas and new blood in?

No disrespect to him it was time to make a change and it felt good.  The feel of the record, it’s just, it’s got a feel that I wanted that I couldn’t get before.

There’s a bit more rock in there than before.

It’s a rock ‘n’ roll record for sure.  We wanted to make a rock ‘n’ roll record.  I wanted Fran my guitar player to just shine on this record ‘cos what attracted me to him in the first place was his band The Tom Collins back in Atlanta.  He was the singer and the lead guitarist and they were a 3 piece and he was just the most badass Jimmy Page mother fucker guitar player in Atlanta and I was thinking you’re gonna come play with me and hardly get to solo?  That’s not fun I wanted him to just really tear it up on this record.  It’s fun for everybody.

The album certainly seems to play to people’s strengths.  The first song you song put out to introduce ‘The Spade’ was ‘Summer of 89′. This is back to some good old rock n roll and the blurb for the album says to expect 10 more songs like it.

Yeah I think there’s only one slow mid tempo song on the record.

There’s a couple that start off slow and you think that’s a nice slow one and then it kicks back in. Like the one with the Mandolin for example.

Dublin Crow?  I wrote that on tour over here last year when we were doing the UK it’s just one of those songs.

It name checks a few places over here.

It didn’t sound gratuitous when I wrote it!

That starts with the ‘little guitar’ part and then it kicks back in. I thought it’d be a slow song all the way through and then you bought the rock back!  Synthesizers is another​.

I felt like I was trying to maybe just explore all of the things I grew up on, I was just never comfortable sticking to one thing.  Like growing up with all different styles of rock n roll and then you start making music professionally everyone expects you to be one way and I just never wanted to be one way. I didn’t wanna just gratuitously change it, I just felt like making some sort of light departure from the last thing.

Each album seems to have a different feel to it.  If I’m trying to big you up to people and they ask what you’re like I have to say “Well it depends on what album you’re listening to!”

And there’s also a time stamp.  I mean I obviously wouldn’t do hair metal if you paid me now!!  And obviously in marvellous 3 I’m proud of it but y’know it was a sound for the time.  Not just trying to keep up with the times cos if anything I’ve gone way back instead of forward now and I’ve gone back to what I grew up on and tried not to be fashionable.  But at the time you know we did that because that’s what we thought we had to do to be popular and to get noticed; to sound like what was contemporary at the time.  The less I had to worry about that then the more I could think outside the box and I didn’t mind it, I still thought we made really good records in marvellous 3 but that to me now is not A: relevant or B: in my blood.  My back is too bad to jump around and have pyro going off.

I saw you jump around last gig.

Yeah I still can’t stop that, I just used to do it a lot more!!  My back is 41 and my brain is 12! It’s a bad combination.

I think it’s impossible, it doesn’t matter what it is I just have a hard time not getting into it.

It seems like there was a marked change from ‘Left of Self Centered’ to ‘Letters’ you seem to have left that side behind.  It was the ‘Letters’ album I first discovered and I went onwards from there before heading into the back catalogue and finding it was completely different. Was this the time you conciously made the decision to change your style?

Well it wasn’t a concerted effort, I think it was just me finally wanting to do something that I had been scared to do which was be subtle!!  Explore subtlety and explore just maybe a more gentle place that I always felt like I couldn’t do as a ‘dude’.  That was just me being young and immature and not taking anything away from those records cos with that brazen immaturity and reckless abandon comes irreplaceable fun on records, something I would never be able to duplicate now as I’m a different person in life.   It helped to put down my guard a little bit, nothing is more pathetic than an aging rocker, and I am one!!  Nothings more pathetic than that, like I don’t wanna see Gene Simmons all fat and bloated with a bat suit on in a wig.  I don’t wanna see that!   And I get it they’re protecting the ‘brand’ but I’m not a marketing genius or a brander, I hate the word brand, I don’t understand that mentality.  I just wanted to go into something that would suit my age a little bit more.

Listening to ‘Letters’ there’s not even a distorted guitar until track 9 or track 10 and that was right after ‘Left Of Self Centered’ wasn’t it?  And that was full of crank it up to 11 solos!

Yeah I was shredding my balls off!!  I wanted to, it’s like a dog that could lick its private parts he does it cos he can.  Not everybody can and I was like that’s what I can do and I just sat there and licked my nuts the whole record.  And it’s funny to analyze it that way but it’s really the way it was. It was really just me getting as far as I could go and I did it.  I did everything; I engineered it, I wrote it, I produced it and I played every instrument.  I think I was just searching for some respect in the market place, I don’t know why.  I just think I’d been beat up a little bit from people and I really felt like that was my way of rebelling and in the long run it doesn’t really matter so I just wanted to exercise some subtlety and see if that would work.

More writing for yourself than writing for the buyer then?

Yeah. I felt that it made me write songs from a more honest place cos I didn’t have a guard up anymore. It didn’t fell like every song had to be some non conformity anthem or something; we don’t need any more of those.  So I was like ok I’m just gonna start writing about some experiences that I’ve maybe been too scared to write about.

The first song I heard of yours was ‘Joan’, which was probably the quietest part of your career.

That’s definitely a proud moment for me as a writer I’m really proud of that one.

Do you think playing something like that shows a different side to you?

I just thought it was interesting, the concept of just listening to lyrics.  I grew up listening to good lyrics once I learnt how to appreciate them when I got into some of the better songwriters out there and got away from just hearing a melody and realised that these people were actually saying something.  I thought the only way I would get people to listen was just to turn down the guitar a little bit and get people to listen to the lyrics, cos I didn’t think people were maybe listening.

What I like about a lot of your lyrics is you tell a good story, you’re good at word play and going back to Joan that was a great story with every verse you can picture the scenario.  Do you focus a lot on the lyrics or do you find that melody comes in first?

No, I think most of the time, and it’s changed a little bit recently cos the records have been more as a group effort, but in the past I did a lot of just writing notes and notes and notes just lyrics everywhere and then I would somehow cobble them together and do a song.  So the music would come second. I know with a lot of bands they get an instrumental together and the singer will come in at the last minute and puts lyrics on it. I couldn’t do that, I’ve never had that talent!  To just come in under pressure and just stand right there and listen to a full blown track and write lyrics…  Too much pressure.  I always just wrote the lyrics first and then the music just wrote itself for lack of a better cliché!!

 

Well thats probably enough reading for one sitting, plenty more questions to come including topics such as working with Tommy Lee, Gilby Clarke, Jason Newsted and Pink. Song writing and accidental plagiarism. His thoughts on talent show artists. How he writes and who he writes with. How he puts a set list together and how he choses which covers to put in it…. Part Two coming soon!