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Stay Gold
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Stay Gold
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Butch Walker
Butch Walker
Craig Manning talks with the man, the legend, Butch Walker.
LATEST ARTICLES

My Life In 35 Songs, Track 9: “When Canyons Ruled the City”

My Life in 35 Songs
Craig Manning

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.

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Butch Walker Done Making Solo Albums

Butch Walker
Jason Tate

Butch Walker talked with Rolling Stone about the anniversary of Letters and how he’s done with solo albums:

“I don’t want to be that cliché of an aging artist that puts out new shit that nobody cares about,” Walker tells Rolling Stone. “And when you write so many records doing a certain thing, you start to worry about recycling and repeating yourself. I would rather celebrate a record that has an anniversary — and I have a lot of them. By the time I get through that cycle, I’m going to be like 900 years old.” […]

So, if Walker is serious about calling his solo career quits, would that make 2022’s Butch Walker as…Glenn, his excellent piano-man LP in the vein of Elton John and Billy Joel, his final album?

“Glenn was the swan song,” he confirms. “And I thought that when I did it. I just really needed to process it over a year or two and see if my theory held up.”

Review: Butch Walker – Letters

Butch Walker - Letters
Craig Manning

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.

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Butch Walker Talks Green Day, Taylor Swift, and More

Butch Walker
Jason Tate

Butch Walker talked with COS in a new wide ranging interview:

Keep in mind, as a producer, this is the ugly side, where longtime fans of a band hear that they want to “broaden their horizons” and do something different, and the first thing they do is shoot the producer. They hate the producer because the formula for their Coca-Cola got changed and they are very mad because of a band wanting to do something different.

To Green Day’s credit, this vision was Billie’s. This was his vision. It wasn’t like I came in and said “let’s change it all up, let’s make a ’70s glam throwback record.” But at the same time, this was the kind of shit that he was into at the time, and it’s my wheelhouse. I love making records like that and those are huge influences for me too, I grew up on glam and power pop and metal and rock. So we had a great time making it and it was absolutely a collaborative effort. We spent a lot of time sending files back and forth — COVID was looming but it hadn’t hit yet. They have a very over-qualified massive studio in Oakland and of course, I have my sandbox, and I was like, “Hey, I work best in my sandbox,” and Billie would be like, “Okay, cool, I usually work best in mine.” So I was like, “Great, let’s send stuff back and forth and then we’ll get into the studio.”

Review: Butch Walker – As…Glenn

Craig Manning

A bar band balladeer playing songs in a smoky dive, hammering away at the piano and spilling his soul onto the keys as the hour gets progressively later and the inattentive crowd gets progressively more intoxicated. Or maybe there isn’t much of a “crowd” at all and he’s mostly playing for the bartender and a few drunk regulars. For so many musicians, these sentences describe a day-by-day and night-by-night reality. Getting gigs is easy; getting the audience to pay even an ounce of attention is hard. And yet, if you live that life, you still show up every night, seeking solace in the songs you’re playing and hoping that, one of these nights, even one other person will find meaning in them too.

We tend to think of careers in music as glamorous, but if you’ve actually tried your hand at one, you know the reality is something else entirely. It’s late nights and long tours and loneliness. It’s drunk people talking over your songs. It’s the sting of polite but passionless applause. It’s bar fights breaking up your set and derailing any momentum you felt you had going onstage. It’s the hope that maybe this song, maybe this show, maybe this night will be different; maybe this one will be the big break. And it’s the crushing disappointment of your reality consistently falling well short of your expectations.

On his 10th full-length album, Butch Walker turns all of this not-so-glamorous musical reality into fertile ground for the best music he’s made in years. The album in question, Butch Walker As…Glenn, is a not-quite-concept-album about a bar singer named Glenn (Butch’s middle name) and the songs he plays in his set on any given night, in any given pub, in any given town in America. Unlike Butch’s last album, 2020’s full-blown rock opera American Love Story, there isn’t really a firm narrative here. The concept is little more than a framing device, with the album starting on an introduction of the titular singer, ending with an encore, and featuring a skit about one of those aforementioned bar fights somewhere in the middle.

But listen to the songs themselves and you can hear how the spirit of the concept bled into Butch’s writing for this album. All the big-dream romanticism and all the weathered weariness of being a working-class career musician is there in the music, and the album knits those conflicting emotions and moods together into a surprisingly poignant treatise on resilience and the beauty of a no-frills, knockout song. Will Hoge once wrote: “Keep on dreaming if it breaks your heart.” Glenn is all about the musicians who keep dreaming that dream year after year, looking for moments of transcendence amidst colorful stage lights and bar floors sticky from decades worth of spilled beer. Some nights, you find that transcendence. Other nights, it might as well be a billion lightyears away.

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Butch Walker Week

Butch Walker
Craig Manning

Once upon a time, I had a lot more time to write about music than I do now!

In 2013, about a year after I joined the staff at AbsolutePunk, I decided I’d take on a project called “Butch Walker Week.” The basic idea was that I’d go back and write about every Butch album, from the records with his former band Marvelous 3 up to his solo output, in the week leading up to his then-new EP Peachtree Battle. That project ended up running 11 reviews and about 16,000 words of text.

When Jason started reviving old AbsolutePunk content to post here on Chorus, I knew I wanted to resurrect this feature. Butch Walker has been one of the absolute constants in my musical evolution for the past 15 years. Getting to write about all his records back then was super fulfilling (and even earned some Twitter recognition from the man himself). Reading back through these reviews reminded me how much these albums meant to me (and how much they continue to mean to me now). So whether you’re familiar with Butch’s work or just thinking about listening to him for the first time, I hope you’ll give these old write-ups a look!

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