Are we having a conversation?
Those are the first words you hear on Butch Walkers upcoming albumAmerican Love Story,due out May 8.
Or, as he says with a laugh, the known fashionable term: rock opera.
Credit: Haley McDonald/Crush Music
(Hes worked on over 100 albums stretching from Green Day to Harry Connick Jr. to Taylor Swift.)
In between gun-for-hire gigs, Walker has produced his own string of cult-favorite records.
(Or as he puts it on the album: “Divided States of America.")
In short, we had a conversation.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Was this an all-at-once struck-you-in-the-middle-of-the-night idea?
Or was it something you tinkered with over time?
I thought “Oh, man.
Nobody wants a social record out of me.”
But to be honest, some of my favorite music is the protest records from the ’60s and ’70s.
And in the ’90s, people were raging against the machine, so to speak.
I think at this point people are just so scared to voice their opinions.
And this is something that I don’t think people should be scared to talk about.
I had a couple of songs and I played them for my manager.
And he was like, “Well, I’m sensing a theme here.”
And I was like, “Yeah, I guess so.”
I mean, I had not planned on it being one.
But I just couldn’t write about love.
I was so exhausted from that format.
I’m not inspired by anything else except this topic.
And then new ones too.
Two years ago I had this thing sitting and done.
Did you shelve it because you were producing other people’s records?
Or it just didn’t feel like the right time?
That’s all stuff that pays the bills.
But at the same time, [my own] writing and touring is a thing too.
Maybe this is a record that’s just anonymously put out there as its own side project.”
So what changed your mind?
I was like, “How am I going to tour this?”
People would be like, “What the hell did he just say?”
It just had to be the right time and the right place.
Because I thought, “Well, this is its own animal.
And I guess I just never felt that the timing was right for that until now.
In fact, some of the tunes with the most potentially incendiary lyrics are the catchiest.
Well, that was the idea.
I love beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.
I thought, “Well, this will be an interesting little bait and switch.”
I kind of sadistically like that.
And concerns for your future, for your kids.
I feel like I was facing that everyday growing up.
Yep and believe me, I’ve had lots of time to think about that.
Rob Thomas from Matchbox Twenty is one of the first people I played this for.[Ed.
note: Walker produced Thomas’s recent solo albumChip Tooth Smile.
By no means is this supposed to be an attack.
If anything, it’s supposed to incite a conversation on every level.
Because people don’t converse about anything anymore.
They go straight from zero to offended immediately.
I can tell you for a fact, I’m one of those people.
Because I mean, here I’m a redneck living in California.
I’m all confused.
And it’s like, “No, not really.”
I mean, I’ve spent my time between both places.
And I care about a lot of things.
And then you hear the California hippie girl saying the stuff that she’s saying.
You make a joke in your notes about turning it into a TV movie.
But do you have aspirations to transpose it into a visual medium?
I mean that would be the thing, right?
It’d be ironic if it ever turned into something that could be a visual spectacle.
And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think big every time I do something.
I definitely don’t ever feel like I’m subtle.
That being said, I would love more than anything for this to turn into something like that.
I think it would hurt me physically to play that kind of music now.
How about Marvelous 3?
I’m not ruling that one out.
