Catching Up With... Butch Walker

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Growing up in Athens, Ga., I spent my entire life surrounded by musicians. A night out meant going to the bar around the corner to see whatever local act wasn't too drunk to get on the stage and play a little rock 'n' roll. When you're bred into music, you have a special place in your heart for hometown acts, and I loved local bands. Or anyone from Georgia, actually. But by the time high school rolled around, I had a definite favorite, and he'd just taken himself solo. His name was (and still is) Butch Walker.

Walker is a musician's musician. He plays every instrument known to man, knows how to work a crowd, has diehard fans unreal in this day and age of 15-minutes-of-fame, and writes the kind of songs that either get stuck in your head for days (the good kind of stuck) or melt your heart to mush. It doesn't hurt that he has zero ego and makes music that speaks volumes to his experience in what's left of the record industry.

After a handful of bands, Walker branched out on his own and has been rolling out indie records while keeping busy producing stadium acts like Fall Out Boy, Avril Lavigne and Katy Perry. All was going swimmingly, until he lost his house and all of personal belongings (including the masters to every song he's ever recorded) in the November 2007 fires in Malibu. In reaction to the devastating loss, the whip-smart singer is set to release his most confessional album to date, Sycamore Meadows, which came out yesterday.

Walker: Hey! Are you in Atlanta?
Paste: Wait. You can’t ask the first question! But, yes.
Walker: It’s funny because I’ve been buying Paste for years and it’s right in my backyard but they’ve never written about me.

Paste: Well, we are now.
Walker: Suh-weet.

Paste: Wait, are you in Atlanta too?
Walker: No, I’m in New York doing some press and playing CMJ and just doing the do.

Paste: Do you split your living time between California and Atlanta usually?
Walker: Yeah, pretty much I have a bi-coastal relationship with Atlanta and L.A. It’s great because my family still all lives in Atlanta and I have a house and a studio there and it’s just my comfortable pair of shoes that I go back to. My band is there and we rehearse for tours there and it's great, but work, for me, is no different than any other day job, I suppose, and when I write and/or produce records for other people I have to be in California for the most part.

Paste: Your new CD is called Sycamore Meadows, which is the name of the street your house was on in Malibu, right?
Walker: Right. Was on.

Paste: Right. Take me through the lineage of this record. When did you start working on it?
Walker: Well, I started to try and work on it before the fires and I just didn’t have anything to say. I’d reached this complacent part of my life where I felt like I’d reached some sort of destination and was done with the journey, so to speak. And I’m only saying that because it’s not like I have the career of Bruce Springsteen where I’m selling out stadiums or have my songs in videos and on TV and radio everywhere, but I felt like that already, early on in my life that I had done so much. I’d been touring for 18 years straight since I was a kid and making records and all of a sudden started doing really well as a solo artist, as a touring artist, self-supported, and I can go and sell out most places in the country without tour support or taking money from anyone and making money, actually. And then making records for other people, and those records selling a lot and making me a good living, all of a sudden having the fruits of your labor and having all of the things you wanted always when you were a child….living that life that you always wanted when you were coming up a poor, struggling musician and you have it finally you go, “Oh, shit. This is it. What now? I can’t even write a fucking song now." I kind of felt like that’s where I was with my life. I didn’t feel like I had anything to say and that kind of made me freak out a little bit. So, I ended up having 2-3 songs written before the fire happened and when the fire took everything we owned and just wiped us out, I kind of had a lot to say after that. It opened up the floodgates, unclogged the bad plumbing that was from my heart to my head with songwriting.

Paste: Was it always meant to be a solo record, or did that just happen after?
Walker: Yeah, it was always meant to be a Butch Walker record. Forgive me for talking in third person. I wanted it to be that. I hadn’t planned on making it some band record or something, whatever. I didn’t feel like that was necessary.

Paste: What changes do you see in this from your past solo output?
Walker: Well, the last record was a pre-conceived almost pseudo-conceptional record of this party band. It was celebratory and just big sounding with vapid, shallow lyrical content. It was done on purpose and I think it might have been misunderstood by a lot of people for being this insincere record but it was supposed to be. If anything it was sincere for me to write a record like that because I wasn’t feeling any sincerity. I wasn’t feeling anything bad in my life a couple of years ago when I did that and I was feeling like… I was getting fucked up every night and having a blast and celebrating my life and celebrating my career 'cause things were going well.

Plus, its just...you have to keep in mind I’ve been doing this since I was a kid and it's been a long, long, long hard road and to get to that point, finally, when I’m doing well with it, you step back and smell the roses a little bit. And that’s the kind of record I made; I didn’t want to write all these schlocky, schmaltzy, break-my-heart love songs when I wasn’t feeling that. But definitely after the fires my heart was broken in half and I think that I probably had a lot to say about it and that’s what opened up the floodgates there. So, it’s a different record in that respect and the new one is also just me. I wrote these songs about my childhood and my experiences and everything from losing my virginity with my keyboard-player girlfriend to the pervert that lived next door to me that I was freaked out by. Things that were kinda personal but I didn’t care and so I definitely think this record screams reality as opposed to the last record, which was surreality.

Paste: You’ve been in a handful of bands and only went solo in the last few years. What do you like about being on your own and what, if anything, do you miss about being part of a group?
Walker: I gotta tell you, I love answering to me only. I was in a band where we were the same guys together for 15 years and it was a beautiful relationship. We are still best friends today, still great friends, and that’s miraculous because we had our fair share of knock-down-drag-outs and drama. I think the beauty of it was not worrying about what decisions would affect others because you take it personally when it's your brothers. When it's your brothers, you don’t want to do something that you think will be good for your band or good for you but could be bad for them and affect them and how they feel and it's horrible. It's really hard and it's why so many bands don’t make it, they just cant...it’s irreconcilable differences. I feel like having myself to blame is much better than blaming it on a collective. Although I did miss some parts, and get a little bit melancholy on the road when its just me and an acoustic and a piano and I’m traveling by myself and I’m sitting in a hotel room or in a restaurant by myself and just going, man I really, really miss the goofy bullshit stories and getting hammered with my band and that kind of thing. It was just so much of a camaraderie there that is irreplaceable.