It felt like an earthquake when she’d shout.
It’s August 1, 2006. I’m 15 years old. I’m on vacation with my family at a secluded, off-the-beaten path vacation spot on the shores of Lake Michigan. My brother, his best friend Frank, and I have tickets to see Butch Walker play a show this evening. We’ve got a three-hour drive straight across the state ahead of us before we can walk through the doors of a sweaty, rundown club right in the heart of downtown Detroit for some loud-as-fuck rock ‘n’ roll. Oh, and it’s the hottest damn day of the year.
Such is the setup for my first-ever concert experience.
Butch Walker isn’t a household name, though I’d wager that just about everyone with a pulse has heard a song he’s written or produced. In the broader context of the music world, Butch is best known as a collaborator, and for the role he’s played in songs and records by everyone from Avril Lavigne to Weezer to Fall Out Boy to Katy Perry. In the context of my musical journey, though, Butch might be the single most important figure of all. From the moment I heard his 2004 album Letters in the winter of my eighth-grade year, nothing was ever quite the same again. Butch had this singular ability to exude not-to-be-fucked-with attitude, approachable wisecracking wit, and heart-on-the-sleeve emotion, all at the same time. To my eyes and ears, he was the coolest guy in school and the soulful poet, a guy whose tatted-up arms and long hair made it all the more surprising when he hit you with a wrenching piano ballad or a smart, insightful breakup song. Letters changed my life because it showed me how versatile songwriting could be. The songs were funny, rousing, self-deprecating, heartbreaking, and 100 percent honest, and I loved them more immediately than I’d ever loved any other music in my life.
Letters was the closest I’d ever come to hearing someone turn their diary pages into music, and that authentic realness drew me to Butch and made me a fan for life. Soon, I was delving into Butch’s back pages. There was his previous record, 2002’s Left of Self-Centered, and its crunchy, sarcastic, ultra-melodic pop-punk-leaning songs. There was his former band, Marvelous 3, who’d made candy-colored power-pop songs in the ‘90s and then pivoted to skyscraping arena rock at the dawn of the new millennium. I even dug into his live albums and b-sides, devouring every scrap of music I could get my hands on. In particular, I loved This Is Me…Justified and Stripped, an acoustic live record he’d recorded in the leadup to Letters that made him sound like the most entertaining showman on the planet. I’d never been to a rock concert in my life, but I knew very early on that seeing a Butch Walker show had to be on my bucket list.
When that opportunity came along in the summer of 2006, it was even more special than I ever could have imagined. But to explain that part of the story, I have to rewind a bit.
I grew up the youngest of three siblings, to a single mom who got remarried when I was four. My sister, Amy, had three years on me; my brother, Andrew, had five. When I was a kid, I remember being close with my sister. We liked the same toys, and the same movies, and the same games, and we shared all those things together.
I had a more complicated relationship with my brother – not combative, but disconnected in a way. The big thing was that Andrew was and is a die-hard sports fan, a passion I did not share. Years later, when I gave a toast as the Best Man at his wedding, I theorized that we struggled to connect because we didn’t understand each other. We were so different that it was like we were speaking different languages, and I’d wager that the disconnect was widened by the absence of our father, who’d been like a best friend to Andrew when he was a kid. When my mom got remarried, our stepdad, Phil, bonded with Andrew over sports, and the two of them became a unit. For a long time, I felt like the odd man out in my family: Andrew and Phil shared this tight connection forged over mutual interests, and mom and sister had the same thing thanks to figure skating, which my mom coached and which became my sister’s core pursuit. I was different, in a lot of ways, from all of them, which sometimes made me feel lonely. I think that’s part of the reason I gravitated toward music, because it felt like a sounding board for all these emotions inside of me that I’d never been able to verbalize even to myself – let alone to anyone else.
When Andrew and I finally found our point of connection, it happened because of music, and it mostly happened because of Butch Walker. During the winter of my eighth-grade year, my brother came home from college for a whole bunch of weekends, and I remember spending those weekends huddled around our respective computers in the den of my parents’ house, trading our latest musical discoveries. One of those discoveries was Letters, and I think that album did something similar for both of us, pushing all our musical buttons in just the right ways. Butch wasn’t the only artist we found common ground over, of course. I lent Andrew the CD copies I’d bought of then-recent albums like Green Day’s American Idiot, The Killers’ Hot Fuss, and Keane’s Hopes & Fears, so that he could copy them onto his computer. He clued me in on ‘90s touchstones like Foo Fighters and Red Hot Chili Peppers.
But something about Letters felt unique, maybe because Butch Walker wasn’t an artist getting airplay on any radio station. Sure, there were songs from Letters popping up on soundtracks around that time – “Mixtape” on the One Tree Hill soundtrack, or “Maybe It’s Just Me” in the Ashton Kutcher vehicle A Lot Like Love. For the most part, though, Butch was still a totally under-the-radar talent. No one I went to school with, for instance, had ever even heard of him. When you’re that age and listening to music that none of your contemporaries are familiar with, that feels pretty damn cool. It felt even cooler knowing that my brother and I were sharing in this moment of discovery, and that Butch and Letters felt like our own little best-kept secret.
From then on, Andrew and I stayed in touch constantly about music. When birthdays or Christmases rolled around, we always exchanged CDs. Usually, it was new albums from familiar artists we both loved. For my brother’s 21st birthday in 2006, for instance, I got him Keane’s Under the Iron Sea and Dashboard Confessional’s Dusk and Summer, two hotly-anticipated albums that happened to drop around that time. And speaking of hotly anticipated, when Butch Walker rolled out the follow-up to Letters that same summer, a glam-infused record called The Rise and Fall of Butch Walker and the Let’s-Go-Out-Tonites!, we counted down the days until the CD my brother had preordered arrived in the mailbox.
The arrival of The Rise and Fall… was exciting for a lot of reasons. Hearing the new album from an artist that had soundtracked basically every moment of the preceding year and a half? Thrilling. Getting to share that album and react to it in real time with my brother? Unforgettable. Playing the record’s catchy, charisma-filled songs all summer long, in the season they were clearly built for? Picture perfect. The best thing of all, though, was the fact that Butch and his band were hitting the road to support the new album, and they were coming to Detroit on the first night of August. Andrew bought us tickets, and just like that, my first-ever concert was weeks away. I couldn’t recall ever being more excited, about literally anything.
The show was at Saint Andrew’s Hall, a storied rock club in Detroit with a performance history that dates back to 1907. It’s a cool-looking little brownstone venue with a 1,000-person capacity and a reputation for booking under-the-radar rock acts. The most notable thing about the place, though – at least on August 1, 2006 – was that it did not have air conditioning.
A rock club can get to be a hot place even in the best of circumstances, because that’s just what happens when you cram hundreds of people into a cramped, not-super-well-ventilated place and put them in a scenario where they’re going to be jumping around and screaming for hours on end. Subtract air conditioning from this equation and add a 97-degree August day, and you have a recipe for disaster. 2006 was also before Michigan banned smoking in bars and restaurants, which meant a bunch of my fellow concertgoers were lighting up and adding the putrid smell of cigarettes to the sweltering, sweaty pit that is this venue.
While the temperature made that show a challenge in certain ways – it got to the point where Andrew, Frank, and I were running to the bathroom in between songs to soak our shirts in cold water from the sink, just to get some relief from the heat – it also made it unforgettable. There was something almost comical about the situation, and about how the bands onstage reacted to it. I remember Butch having his background singers douse the crowd with water from a hose, which is not something I can say I have ever witnessed at any other show. Also, having never been to a rock show before, I was not prepared for how thunderously loud it was going to sound. For the first 10 minutes of the first opening band, Maine-hailing pop-rockers As Fast As, I was experiencing the truest sensory overload of my life, between the noise and the heat. I thought my head might explode.
My ears adjusted in time for the second band, an up-and-coming pop-punk act that had been making waves on MySpace with songs like “The Great Escape,” “Thunder,” and “Hero/Heroine.” That band, Boys Like Girls, would end up becoming a legitimate pop chart success story within a couple years, and their frontman, Martin Johnson, has written songs for everyone from Taylor Swift to Avril Lavigne to Ariana Grande. Go figure. (Spoiler alert, but you’ll be hearing more on him, and them, later in this series.)
When Butch finally hit the stage, he was electric. It would be easy for that kind of oppressive heat to sap the energy of any performer, but Butch seemed to feed off it. I remember him tossing his guitar picks into the air and catching them without even missing a strum, or climbing up on top of the bass drum and leaping off it. I remember lots of blazing guitar solos and funny crowd banter. I definitely remember when Butch kicked his band off the stage to play a pair of story-driven piano songs, “Joan” and “Dominoes,” somehow achieving pin-drop quiet from the antsy, overheated crowd. And I remember the band reappearing onstage midway through the third piano song, “Cigarette Lighter Love Song,” for a loud-as-hell main set finale, complete with a chef’s-kiss interpolation of the Oasis classic “Don’t Look Back in Anger.”
What I can’t remember is whether Butch actually played the track this week’s essay is technically about, “When Canyons Ruled the City,” on that particular evening. The closing number from The Rise and Fall…, “Canyons” is a sumptuous, triumphant climax of a song, transcending a quirky and potentially hokey concept – the personification of the canyons around Los Angeles into characters worthy of soap opera drama – to become a “Hey Jude” style anthem. The song is great on record, but it’s even better in a live setting, where it’s euphoric, wordless “na na na nahhhh” hook never fails to spur spirited sing-alongs from the entire crowd. Whether or not Butch and his band played “Canyons” that night, though, I’ll always associate it with that day, and that summer, and the bond my brother and I built through Butch Walker’s music. When I hear the song now, I instantly flash back to that road trip across Michigan with Andrew and Frank, headed to Detroit to see the show with all the anticipation in the world; and also to the road trip back across Michigan later that night, all of us soaked with sweat, smelling like smoke and sweat and spilled beer, and feeling like we’d just seen God.
A good concert gives you a chance to spend a memorable night with friends, reconvening with songs you love and cutting loose amidst the noise blasting out of the speakers and the hundreds of voices around you, all taking up the same melody. It lasts for a night and then it’s gone, something that can never quite be recaptured or re-experienced – no matter how many photos you took or videos you recorded on your phone. The best concerts, though, are the ones that stay in your blood and your bones months, years, or even decades after the house lights come back up. I’m lucky that my first concert was one of those.
I’ve seen Butch a dozen times since then, 11 of them with Andrew. On three occasions, we’ve followed his tours and to catch two consecutive nights in different cities. Once, we rang in the New Year at his show in Chicago, complete with an open bar. In 2023, we got to see him play both an intimate, confessional record store show all by himself, and a raucous, celebratory reunion show with his old band, Marvelous 3. Several times, we’ve landed spots front row and center, and each of those times, we’ve helped Butch climb down into the crowd for the encore section of the show. Andrew and I have road-tripped a lot of miles together to catch Butch Walker shows, and every one of those shows has been incredible. I am extremely grateful to have had those experiences.
But if I had to pick my favorite Butch concert, it would still be that first one. I knew, walking out the doors of Saint Andrew’s that night, that I’d gotten something from that show I would never lose. I’d wash away all the remnants of the concert when we got back to our vacation cottage at 3 in the morning: the X’s on my hands, the sweat on my skin, the sickly smell of cigarette smoke in my hair. But I’d never wash away the love for live music that I found in that hot-as-hades club in the middle of Detroit on the first night of August 2006. It’s still here, and it’s writing these words.
Past Installments: