Catching Up With... Butch Walker

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Paste: Is it just you up there on this tour or are the Let’s Go Out Tonites up there with you?
Walker: It’s just me, but in November when I do a week of dates of just little club shows around the release of the record, I’m taking my boys out. It’s a collective of people, some people from the Let’s Go Out Tonites and some guys from other bands in town. It’s going to be fun; it’ll be a big wall of sound.

Paste: And you’re playing a bunch of just small shows, right?
Walker: Yeah, I am, just on that week that the record comes out because we just wanted to do a little album release club tour before Spring when I got out and do theaters again.

Paste: Who is the girl singing on “Here Comes The…”?
Walker: That’s Alecia Moore, she’s the girl known as Pink. She is a really, really, dear sweetheart and friend of mine and I worked on her records doing the pop thing and she’s just the real deal when it comes to pop singing. She is just one of the best singers I’ve ever heard. I mean, I’ve told her a hundred times if she would make a record as Alecia Moore and just do like a Janis Joplin blues record it would blow people's minds. It would totally blow their mind...but I get it. She’s a pop entertainer right now and she’ll have her whole life to do that. But that’s why I also liked having her. I didn’t do it for gratuitous reasons; that’s like her favorite song. She said that if I recorded it, because she always comes to see me play, that she better be singing background on it. I kinda said, "OK, well twist my arm," because she’s got an amazing voice.

Paste: And you’re in her video for "So What?", right? I read that but I couldn’t find you. Where are you at?
Walker: Yeah, she asked me to come be in a scene where I piss in a bottle and hand it to her and she gives it to a little kid to drink. It’s a really quick cameo where I’m in an alley with a guy and we’re peeing in bottles. It’s retarded. These are the things you do for friends.

Paste: Is there anyone else that guested on this album?
Walker: It was kept pretty sparse, I did most of it myself. I usually have a lot more people on the records but I just did most of this myself because most of the record is just me and a piano or me and a guitar. My friend Roger Joseph Manning, he plays keyboards in Beck and Air and was in Jellyfish, he’s a good buddy of mine and he played all over the record, keyboard stuff, mellotron and stuff like that. Matt Chamberlain from Fiona Apple and a bunch of other people, he played drums on a couple of songs. And then my drummer Darren, whom I love, he played on a bulk of the record. He’s pretty much my mainstay drummer. But I’m pretty much a jack of all trades and that’s to fault sometimes and I’ll just end up playing everything on it anyway, just out of convenience. But no, I don’t have any sexy story of like Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen singing on a song. We could lie and say I did, though.

Paste: [laughs] The video for “Ships in a Bottle” was shot in the wreckage of your home in Malibu. Why did you decide to shoot that and why that particular song?
Walker: Because… I didn’t know if it would be weird to do that because I wasn’t just doing it to cash in on a tragedy. I honestly wrote that song and recorded it two weeks before the fires and it had all these metaphors for a relationship burning and fire and ashes and all these words that really were kind of creepy. I went to see the house when I got back in town after it burned and I was kind of having to come to terms with everything and see it and get closure. The wreckage was just insane and overwhelmingly emotional to see. The remains of, or hardly any remains, of things I could barely make out where things were and standing in areas where there used to be a floor below it and a floor above it and just sitting there thinking that this looks like a war zone. It was also just the weird dichotomy of it sitting there in front of this beautiful ocean view up on a canyon hill and then there is just this nasty wreckage. I thought that I should just call my buddy and have him come over and we’ll just film a little video for “Ships in a Bottle” here so I can have a something to show my son when he is older. I didn’t really do it thinking it was going to be a video that would be anything big at all. It was strictly just for private reasons to have but I wanted to share it with fans too. I wanted them to see it.

Paste: Well, you do have the best fans in the world.
Walker: Oh, they’re great. They really are. I’m blessed. I can’t believe it. Its not like I’m the most hip, cool guy on the planet and I don’t think they claim to be those kind of fans either, but the good news is that when this week's blog-worthy band is selling out shows and then 15 minutes later no one gives a shit anymore, these people have just been coming back to see me every year. I cant ask for better. I mean, wouldn’t you want that over being hot for one minute? It’s really cool; I’m extremely lucky.

Paste: Do you plan on making videos for any of the other songs on the record?
Walker: Yeah, we’re shooting a video next Tuesday for “The Weight of Her.” It’s kind of the single pick that they’re doing. So we’re doing that video; it's going to be fun.

Paste: Can you tell me anything about it?
Walker: Yeah, well, it won’t have anything to do with fire or any houses burning and it's going to be kind of a little California Bonnie and Clyde/True Romance shake-up kind of a video. Me and a particular woman. It’ll be fun.

Paste: Is it Avril Lavigne [star of his video for "Bethamphetamine (Pretty Pretty)"]?
Walker: God, no. No, its not anybody that anyone knows, but it’s going to be fun. She's going to be beating the shit out of me; it’s gonna be great. Get in touch with my sadistic side, so it should be cool. The guys that are directing it are really good and have a sharp eye and we’re going to shoot it in an old Western town. I’m excited about doing something that’s not going to make me bum out. Like shooting in front of your house that’s burned down wasn’t exactly fun. This will be something I can actually get a good laugh out of. No star cameos, sorry. I’m not using my producer connections anymore to try and impress people because my fans don’t give a shit. If anything, they hate that. They don’t even want me producing other records because it takes away from me singing.

Paste: This is your third solo disc and the third time you’ve ended the CD with the most sad song on the disc. Is that on purpose, and if so, why?
Walker: I don’t know why I do that. Is that so 1900? I don’t even know if…ugh. I was going to end it with a song that was called “Closer to the Truth and Further from the Sky,” and I didn’t. I don’t know why I didn’t, but I wanted to because that one ends so bombastically. It worked out so well putting “ATL” at the end, though. For technical reasons, there was this interesting part where this guitar effect was going at the end of “Closer to the Truth” and the song just crumbles and dissipates and becomes like nothing left and you hear this guitar effect feeding back and it slows down and goes right in time with my footsteps walking into the room and up to the piano. If you listen really loud you can hear it; it like morphs into my footsteps walking to the piano and I was like, "OK, I gotta leave that." And then there’s also another little track that’s way after “ATL,” like five minutes after, that’s kinda hidden on the record. It’s called “Voice and Piano.” I put [it] in there [and] no one knows about [it]. I was going to start the record with that, but the fun thing is that on the CD, if anyone even buys CDs anymore, if you listen to it on repeat and you hear that song come on, when it’s over it goes right into “The Weight of Her” and it’s a nice little kicker. But I don’t think anyone is even going to find the song unless they accidentally let the CD keep playing after “ATL” is over.

Paste: Well, now they might.
Walker: Yeah, we’ll get the word out.

Paste: “Going Back/Going Home” runs down your entire career and then you have two songs about Atlanta. What draws you to write such autobiographical stuff?
Walker: It’s not like I think my life is that exciting or significant and maybe it’ll just be something for fans to get a kick out of. But it was really just me being reflective after the fires. I was feeling very nostalgic and missing a lot of the things that we lost and it just kind of triggered a song. When I was stuck in New York when the fires happened and I was telling my manager that I needed to get back home...I had this thought that, well, I guess there is no home, and so I’m just going back. That’s when I realized that there is a huge difference and so that’s the first thing I said to my manager. He said, "You should write a song about that, you know, knowing the difference between going back and going home. It’ll be your best song yet!” And then I just spewed out my life story in 20 seconds. And that came pretty naturally, whereas before I don’t think I would have ever been that narcissistic to tell a story about myself because I wouldn’t think it was relevant. But I didn’t do it for that reason. It's not because it's self-important; I just did it strictly for nostalgic reasons.

Paste: Do you have a favorite song from this album to play live yet?
Walker: You know what? The last few shows I’ve been playing acoustic and I really enjoy playing “Closer to the Truth.” And then I like playing “Passed Your Place, Saw Your Car, Thought of You,” and songs that I just didn’t expect to enjoy playing live but people seem to really get into them. They get a good connection with them.

Paste: Do you have a really common request that you get a lot? Whether its random or old or…?
Walker: Besides “Freebird” and “Grant Park” and songs that I wrote 20 years ago that I think are horrible and wouldn’t be caught dead singing? I think a lot of people want to hear, well, a lot of people yell out to hear “Don’t Move,” which is a song off of Letters. I think it's just because it’s a good live song to sing because its got that loud/quiet, loud/quiet thing about it, the dynamic. A lot of people love to hear an old Marvelous 3 song, so I get “Cigarette Lighter Love Song” and “Every Monday” a lot.

Paste: What music is currently inspiring you? What’re you listening to?
Walker: Well, I think a lot of people would be surprised to hear what I listen to because I listen to different things. I listen to almost everything except pop music. Most people that only know me as a producer will be like, well, first of all, that they didn’t know I sing, then they’ll say, “You don’t sound anything like Avril or Pink!” Well, am I supposed to? Would I want to? I don’t even listen to the radio. I don’t know what's popular. If you tell me I’m surprised and appalled and shocked a lot of the time when I hear what is, so I don’t get into it. Most of the music I like doesn’t even get played anywhere but that’s changing slowly. Independent music is seen and heard in so many different medias now. I love the new My Morning Jacket record. I love all their records and every time they put one out, I get it. I love Lucinda Williams; her new record is amazing. There are so many. I buy so many records. I love Spoon. And this is all new stuff because I can obviously say old stuff all day long. There are obvious winners there. But with new music there is so many exciting things out there. You could probably mention it and I have it.

Paste: Let's do old music. Three desert island records, go!
Walker: Well, lets see. I may not actually listen to these records now, but they were big for me so maybe I’d want to keep them around me just since I’m feeling nostalgic now. I would probably take My Aim is True by Elvis Costello. I would take, as cliché as it is to say, Grace by Jeff Buckley, but because it's just such a great fucking record, even though I know it's so common for people to say that, but it is. It's hard to narrow this down because it might be something I just have been listening to that’s only a month old. Who knows if I’ll feel that way 5-10 years from now? The third one. I don’t know, maybe I should take one of my records just to see how much it sucks in comparison. It will strive me to be better.