Tune in, kick back, soak it up. It’s John Butler season.
The veteran Western Australian talent is currently on the road in support of PRISM, which dropped September 5th via Jarrah Records/MGM, his 10th studio album and the third in his sprawling, four-part “seasons” project.
Planted prior to the pandemic, PRISM is a solo testimony on love, loss, and politics, and marks a formal departure from the John Butler Trio.
“PRISM just sent me on an odyssey, on a journey, that I didn’t realise I was on,” he tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ. Along the way, “I’d failed tremendously, which is really important to do in making art or anything.”
Pre-COVID, Butler had just finished his last tour with the trio and wanted to take a break and “just play solo for a while,” he explains. “I was always gonna just go solo and have a deep ride, and make sure that my magnetic North was in myself in my performance as an artist, solo. It’s what I needed to go back to.”
With no shortage of ambition, Butler set about building his four-story project. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna make my opus, I’m gonna make a whole world.’ I got carried away really quickly and spent two years making this album by myself. I was channeling Kevin Parker to see if I could do it all myself. That was fun. I learned a lot about honing my production skills. I was making all the beats and all the synths and all the guitars and kind of create [sic] this symphony of sound.”
What wasn’t fun was the collection of sneaky banana peels that lay in wait. Butler’s computer crashed, potentially ruining all of the music he had worked on. That “freak out” moment created a trigger where going into the studio “now became a stressful exercise.”
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Worse would come.
Butler endured the death of his dad, and his wife’s father, within 40 hours. With that “marital distress and raising two teenage kids, the anxiety and the PTSD,” he remembers, “I had to surrender and give up, which I’m not good at doing.”
Butler did just that, finding inspiration at the starting block. To get the “four seasons” back on the calendar, he had to “heal and then begin again,” and rediscovered the spirit in his very first recording, an instrumental tape that he sold on the street busking. Now, the music was speaking “very clearly” and he’d “clearly gotten ahead of myself.”
Later, Butler opened up the process and welcomed into the fold producer James Ireland (POND, San Cisco), who kicked those final recordings into shape, including the lead track and album opener “Going Solo” and the first single “Trippin on You“.
PRISM follows an album of meditations (Running River) and a fully instrumental LP (Still Searching). The fourth, he’s not entirely certain of its voice. “Maybe it’ll be a live album in the studio or it’ll be more of a band kind of thing,” he says, “but we’ll see.”
Butler’s national run, presented by Double J and Jarrah Records, continues with capital city shows and a host of regional dates. Emma Donovan is a special guest, and The Waifs will share the stage next month in Cairns and Darwin.
Whether in the studio or on stage, Butler is an admitted taskmaster. “I expect a lot out of myself, and I expect a lot out of the people I work with,” he says. “I’m nice, but if I think something can be excellent, I usually won’t stop until it satisfies that itch of being excellent.
“There’s a lot of great people doing a lot of great things on this planet. Like, they’re really, really good at what they do. I figure if I’m here to do something at a high level, let’s do it the best we can. The music, usually, when it comes to me, it sounds pretty amazing in my mind. And so I’m always just trying to meet how I hear it inside my head.”
John Butler’s PRISM is out now via Jarrah Records/MGM. Tickets for the PRISM Tour are on sale at johnbutlertrio.com.
