After releasing 10 studio albums that run the gamut from rock-opera concept records to collections of cocksure power-pop, Butch Walker is putting a period on his recording career as a solo artist. Ironically, the singer-songwriter came to that decision while gearing up to commemorate the 20th anniversary of his breakthrough solo album, Letters.
“I don’t want to be that cliché of an aging artist that puts out new shit that nobody cares about,” Walker tells Rolling Stone. “And when you write so many records doing a certain thing, you start to worry about recycling and repeating yourself. I would rather celebrate a record that has an anniversary — and I have a lot of them. By the time I get through that cycle, I’m going to be like 900 years old.”
Walker will kick off the cycle tonight with the first of four concerts revisiting Letters, two at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Forever Cemetery and two later this week in Nashville at the club 3rd & Lindsley. All four shows are sold out.
While not his official solo debut, 2004’s Letters found Walker hitting the singer-songwriter bullseye in a way that 2002’s Left of Self-Centered — his first LP as “Butch Walker” after the breakup of his band the Marvelous 3 — did not. After playing the swaggering rock star in the late Eighties in the Los Angeles hair-metal group SouthGang and, in the Nineties, in Marvelous 3, Walker allowed himself to be vulnerable and wrote a batch of songs inspired by a cache of old letters, both addressed to him and from him, that he found in his parents’ home.
“When the Marvelous 3 dissolved, it was a very depressing time for everybody. I ended up making a record that was basically just me worried about losing the fan base that we had built,” he says of Left of Self-Centered and its alt-rock sound. “It wasn’t authentic to me. But I had this box of letters that my mom had saved up in the attic, like old girlfriend letters and letters to my parents, and so I wrote stories based around that.”
Los Angeles is a running theme on Letters, specifically Walker’s desire to escape from L.A. back to his native Georgia. “Gotta get outta Los Angeles/gotta get Los Angeles outta me,” he sings in the cynical but upbeat “Uncomfortably Numb,” the bookend to “So at Last,” a dreamy ballad about the youthful optimism needed to strike out for California in search of fame.
Other tracks are less about Walker and more about those whose stories affected him. In “Mixtape,” he gives thanks to a failed relationship that gifted him “the best mixtape I have.” The song ended up on the teen drama One Tree Hill, and Katy Perry recorded a version when Walker was producing her One of the Boys album. “It never came out,” Walker says, “but I still have it.”
In “Joan,” the imagined life story of a survivor of domestic violence, Walker wrote his first piano ballad and, what he calls, his “first real song.” It still appears in his set list to this day. “In the past, I covered everything up in a lot of sarcasm and wit and humor and snottiness,” he says, “but ‘Joan’ encouraged me to do more like that and not be so worried about being exposed lyrically.”
On Monday and Tuesday in L.A., and Thursday and Friday in Nashville, Walker will perform “Mixtape,” “Joan,” and the rest of Letters solo on guitar and piano. A few guests may drop by, including, in Nashville, Ashley Monroe, who sang on Walker’s 2016 album Stay Gold and harmonized with him on a just-released cover of Aerosmith’s power ballad “Angel.” He says he never envisions a time when he’s not playing music live — he and the resurrected Marvelous 3 have gigs booked this fall, and he joined Blackberry Smoke onstage in Atlanta this weekend to pay tribute to Brit Turner, the band’s drummer and Walker’s longtime friend who died in March.
He’ll also continue to produce artists. He just oversaw Amythyst Kiah’s new Still + Bright album and is currently working on a new Courtney Love project. “She’s in top form lyrically and she sounds amazing. It’s very age appropriate,” he says.
So, if Walker is serious about calling his solo career quits, would that make 2022’s Butch Walker as…Glenn, his excellent piano-man LP in the vein of Elton John and Billy Joel, his final album?
“Glenn was the swan song,” he confirms. “And I thought that when I did it. I just really needed to process it over a year or two and see if my theory held up.”
