I think I’d been waiting for it.
Butch Walker released Letters, his second full-length album as a solo artist, on August 24, 2004, two weeks before I started eighth grade. At the time, I was right in the middle of a burgeoning obsession with soundtracking every moment of my life. Music had always mattered to me, but something had clicked during the previous school year and songs had taken on a different level of meaning for me since then. Before, I maybe just liked the way something sounded on the radio. Now, I was falling in love with the way those songs could encapsulate the rhythms of my days and nights. I figured: if movies and TV shows had soundtracks, why shouldn’t my life have one too? And so I’d spent months making mixes for everything: for the end of seventh grade, for my summer vacation, for my family’s annual summer road trip to visit my grandparents in New Hampshire, and for the impending end of the season and all the bittersweet emotions that made me feel.
What I hadn’t done yet was make a mix for a girl. I wasn’t too familiar with the concept of mixtapes – with what a collection of songs could mean when you picked the tracks and sequenced them and packaged them for someone you felt romantic feelings for. Surely, I would have found my way to the art of mixtape-ology no matter what, as all music fans do. How long can you obsess over using music to encapsulate your own internal life before you start thinking about how music can play the role of confessional love note? Probably not long. Before I could get there on my own, though, I found my Jedi Master on the subject of mixtapes, and it changed my entire life.
“You gave me the best mixtape I have/And even all the bad songs ain’t so bad.” So goes the chorus to “Mixtape,” the lead single from Letters and the first song I ever heard Butch Walker sing. It’s surreal to look back on that first listen, knowing now that it was my first interaction to the guy who would become my favorite artist of all time. But then again, it’s also fitting that it was “Mixtape” that opened up a whole new doorway in my musical evolution, given what that song has to say. Because “Mixtape” is a song about the way music obsessives think about crushes or love stories: where maybe you can’t quite find the words to say how you really feel about someone, but your favorite band can.
This weekend marks 20 years since the release of Letters, and in that time, I have made a lot of “mixtapes” for a lot of girls. Some of them I’ve given to the people they were meant for; some of them only ever existed on my computer hard drive or my iPod – little fantasy versions of things I wished I’d said. I’ve made a lot of mixtapes for myself, too: Mixes to remember long-gone years of my life; mixes to commemorate summers I loved; mixes for specific days that felt like they deserved a curated soundtrack of significant import. Every time I make a mix, I think about Butch Walker and “Mixtape,” and about the rules the song sets down. Are the “bad” songs too bad? Are the sad songs too sad? “Mixtape” is the song that made me take my growing fascination with the emotional colors of music and use it as a means for expressing who I was and what I cared about.
Letters itself is like a perfect mixtape. It’s a collision of different moods and influences and stories and snapshots of life. The tracklist veers from power-pop heartache (proper opener “Maybe It’s Just Me”) to Laurel Canyon sundowns (“So At Last”), and from bare-as-hell piano ballads (“Joan”) to epic guitar pyrotechnics (“Lights Out”). You can almost feel Butch mixing the tape in the background: a song that sounds like Jackson Browne here, a song that sounds like U2 there; a celebratory summer anthem at track 4, a crushing breakup ballad at track 10. Along the way, he sketches a story about love and heartbreak; about falling in love with a city and then realizing that you have to get the hell out of that city for the sake of your health and your sanity; of life and what it means to write your own story.
Thinking about Letters turning 20 is bittersweet, more so than any other album that I’ve given this type of retrospective treatment. And that’s because, in a lot of ways, this album is the one that made me who I am today. It was, as I said at the top of this writeup, the album I had been waiting for. I’ve written before about how the albums that soundtrack our coming-of-age are the ones we often hold as our most prized musical companions. That’s certainly true for me, and I’ve told pieces of that story through the albums that were my companions, from the first two Jack’s Mannequin albums to the first two Dangerous Summer albums, and from Springsteen’s Born to Run to Taylor Swift’s Red.
Letters is more important to me than any of those albums. When asked to name my favorite album ever, I’ll usually point to Born to Run. But Letters is more foundational, simply because it’s more infused with the blood, sweat, and tears of growing up. The album may have dropped two weeks before my eighth-grade year, but I didn’t hear it for half a year after that. I’ve always been grateful for the delay, because a lot happened in those six months that made Letters an album I could lose myself in. Don’t get me wrong: I firmly believe I would have loved this record no matter when in my life I first heard it. It’s so overflowing with big, bright-colored melodies that I doubt my melody-obsessed brain could ever have resisted it. But if I’d heard Letters in August 2004, I think I would have latched onto the melody first and foremost – the soaring hooks of songs like “Maybe It’s Just Me” and “Uncomfortably Numb” and “#1 Summer Jam” and how they just feel like summer. Hearing it six months later, I heard those euphoric power pop melodies, but I also heard the other thing Letters delivers in spades: pain.
It is not lost on me that I am about to write about “pain” from the perspective of an eighth-grade boy, and that this story is about to veer into the territory of hilarious adolescent angst. But the fact is that, during those six months, between the day Letters dropped and the day I first heard it, two big things happened that made me feel like I knew what pain was. First, my parents told me we were moving away from all my friends and from the only town I’d ever known, which sent me into an absolute tailspin. (As detailed in a retrospective I wrote 10 years ago for a different 2004 classic, my family actually didn’t end up moving, but I sure spent a lot of time moping over the situation in the interim.) Second, I found myself in a teenage “love triangle” that, hysterically, exploded into a lot of drama at my school. I was right in the midst of that situation on the stray February 2005 Saturday when, for the first time ever, I pressed play on Butch Walker’s Letters.
“I can’t live if you’re not happy/I can’t live if you cry/But I can live without you if it makes you smile.” “You say hello, inside I’m screaming ‘I love you’/You say goodnight, in my mind I’m sleeping next to you.” “I can move you like an earthquake/Listen to me as my hands shake/’Cause I want you, I need you/I can’t live without you, baby.” “Thinking of you with my last breath.” I gravitated to Butch, at first, because his songs seemed to capture all the Capital-F “Feelings” I was experiencing at the time. I loved these songs for the same reason that so many of us loved the emo anthems of our youth: They felt like they were taking what was in my heart and putting it through a speaker.
The more I listened to Letters, though – not just that spring, but during the many years that followed – I came to appreciate it more for its wry, humorous depictions of heartache. I loved how “Best Thing You Never Had,” the album’s bitterest breakup anthem, not only included tortured lyrics about a girl who acted like she was “the only one that mattered,” but also some genuinely funny, tongue-in-cheek shit – like a line that uses a toilet seat as a metaphor, or another that compares Butch’s heart to “romantic roadkill” splattered on the side of the road. I definitely loved the part in “Race Cars and Goth Rock” where Butch opines about his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend and his house that’s the size of a mall, and how it makes a grand piano “look so fucking small.” (“It’s probably one of many things that’s small about him, too,” Butch adds, because what’s a song about a rich jackass without a joke about how he must be compensating for his diminutive penis?) I’d never heard an artist pair heartbreak and humor like this, and I found it fascinating. It also meant that, when my eighth-grade love triangle petered out in exactly the kind of lame, anticlimactic way adolescent love often does, I could listen back to Letters and not cringe about everything that had happened, because it was an album that laughed at heartbreak just as much as it reveled in it.
That might be the thing I love most about Letters, actually. There are a lot of albums I put on for specific moods, or seasons, or even times of day. But Letters is the rare album I could put on at any time and have it hit. And because of that, since I was 14 years old, Letters has been there as I’ve written my life story, and as I’ve mixed that story into a million different playlists. Crushes and heartbreaks; friendships that lasted and friendships that faded away; all of high school and all of college; my rowdiest summer days and my loneliest winter nights; celebratory concerts and solitary drives where I reckoned with loss; leaving places behind and coming back to them years later; some of my best days, and some of my very worst. I’ve lived a lot of life with this album, and have a lot of stories with it – way too many to recount here. But somewhere along the line, Letters became a mixtape of moments and memories. More than any other album, this one is my life captured in song.
So thanks, Butch Walker: You gave me the best mixtape I have, and even all the sad songs ain’t so sad.