Following the album release 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.

When Butch Walker released Sycamore Meadows in 2008, it felt like both a new beginning for him 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 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.

“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.

For a long time, I’ve thought that The Rise and Fall of Butch Walker and the Let’s-Go-Out-Tonites! was the most overlooked album in Butch Walker’s discography. Maybe that’s because it was the first Butch album that came out after I had become a die hard fan, and was, as such, probably the most I’ve ever anticipated an album. Or because Butch doing glam rock (and making incredibly obvious David Bowie references) produced the most exciting live set I think I’ve ever seen him play. Or maybe the underrated feel I get from this record is the result of the vast majority of these songs never showing up on “favorite” lists when I chat with other Butch fans. Whatever the reason, The Rise and Fall doesn’t get a lot of talk, and it never has. After this record started landing in fan mailboxes in early July 2006, many of the places that had reviewed Letters favorably stayed silent; one of my fellow bloggers, a guy who loves Butch every bit as much as I do, hardly mentioned the album at all until 2009, when it was one of the records Butch played in full during his winter “residency” concerts that year; and pretty much every Butch fan I’ve met on this very site will wax poetic on Letters or Sycamore Meadows, but will seemingly pretend that this album doesn’t exist.

Letters is the best album of the past ten years, and the best album of the millennium thus far. How’s that for kicking off today’s installment of my “Butch Walker Week” coverage with a bit of hyperbolic praise? Except that I don’t think it’s a hyperbolic statement at all, nor do I think there is a record on the planet—with the possible exception of Born to Run—that has meant more to me in my life than this one. So far with Butch Walker Week, I’ve discussed four great records and dozens of terrific songs, music that I love and hold very near and dear to my heart. Letters blows all of that away in 14 songs and 50-some minutes of the most stunning and mature music that Walker has ever made. To date, Letters is the most cohesive record in the Butch Walker discography. It’s a stunningly gorgeous and sinfully catchy portrait of heartbreak and love on the west coast, sequenced perfectly to represent the ups and downs of a relationship. It’s lyrically brilliant and loaded with hooks, beautifully written and arranged to take advantage of fuller instrumental textures than ever before. The production is lush and enveloping, quite possibly my favorite example of studio work on any record that has ever graced my ears. And Butch’s flawless vocal performance towers above the whole thing, wrapping these songs in grand emotion, laugh-out-loud sarcasm, subtle sadness, and euphoric grandiosity; he has never sounded better.

“Just think, with Rock Vocal Power, you’ll never have to sound like this guy again!”

It’s hardly surprising that Butch Walker’s debut solo album—titled Left of Self-Centered and released by Arista Records in 2002—opens with a fair dose of sarcasm, cynicism, and self-deprecation. The above line comes from “Rock Vocal Power,” the introductory spoken-word track that kicks off the album. The song is satire, playing like a mock infomercial for an instructional audio series that can turn you into a famous rock singer for just six easy installments of $69.95(!) Butch makes fun of well-known and oft-imitated rock frontmen by offering to reveal their secrets (like Eddie Vedder’s “pickle-in-mouth technique,” or Kidd Rock’s “ever-popular hey-look-at-me-I-can’t-sing-so-run-me-through-the-computer” maneuver), and a fake Scott Stapp (the Creed guy) even provides a laugh-out-loud testimonial about going from a “bar singer playing Pearl Jam covers” to the frontman of his own original music band, all thanks to the series. The line quoted above is the final part of the comedy number, acting perfectly as a fade-in to the proper album opener (an energetic, sing-along rocker called “My Way”), and even years later, the bit is still pretty funny because its music-industry-oriented jokes have yet to go out of date. Unorthodox as it is in the opening slot, “Rock Vocal Power” is a patent Butch Walker number, a reminder of both how fickle the music industry is and of Butch’s refreshing decision as a performer to never take himself too seriously.