4 To Watch For: John Butler Trio
Writer: Brian Baker4 To Watch For, Issue 13, Published online on 01 Dec 2004
It must be time for gifted guitarist John Butler’s star to ascend in the United States. He’s become the Dave Matthews of his native Australia, with all of the adulation and vilification that accompanies multi-platinum status.
“You’re always going to get those hardcore people who feel like the only way they can have any identity is to like something that no one else likes, and once everybody else likes it, they don’t,” says Butler. “I try not to think about it. And you’ve always got to change, but there was never a point in my career where I went, ‘Now I want everybody to like my music.’ I’ve always wanted to share it with whoever was into it, and that’s what I’ve always done.”
In the four years since Butler’s last studio album, Three, he’s toured incessantly, released the live album Living in 2003, and celebrated many significant events: an Australian Grammy for Best Independent Album with Three, his 2002 marriage, the 2003 birth of his daughter and his contract with Lava Records who’s releasing his albums Stateside.
The first titles under Butler’s new circumstances are the What You Want/i> EP—released here last fall—and his latest full-length, the evocative and diverse Sunrise Over Sea. Both albums represent a departure for Butler; the success of Three and Living convinced him to shake up his old Trio for a new one (multi-faceted bassist Shannon Birchall and drummers Michael Barker and Nicky Bomba) and at the same time forced him to consider all his musical influences—reggae, hip-hop, Appalachian folk, country, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix—for his next works.
“It was important for me as a musician,” says Butler of the Trio shift. “I’ve worked with a lot of great musicians in this band. It just came to a stage where it needed to move on. The players needed to do some things other than work with me, and I needed to do the same. It was important to my expression in my art to honor the spring cleaning that needed to be done.”
Butler had a new outlook, lyrically, as well, based on freshly discovered influences. “I came across other musicians and poets and realized if you’re a good enough writer, you can actually say more in a sentence than you can in a paragraph,” says Butler. “I looked more at crafting a song on this album and trying to paint a landscape with words rather than going, ‘I’m angry and I’m hurt and here’s why.’ Discovering Ani DiFranco really blew my mind. She can say a lot in just a phrase and I’d never really come across that. Artists like her and Gillian Welch and Paul Kelly—I just realized there’s this whole art form to it. It’s not necessarily always about saying whatever’s on your mind. It can have a lot more impact if you put a little more time into it.”
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