![]() You can force a song into town and it's just lifeless,” he says. When you see something broken and beaten and in loss of life, there's nothing exciting about that. “When you see something wild and majestic and divine, it's so fucking gorgeous. The key, Butler implies, is a light hand when it comes to bringing the best out of these songs. The techniques are like, singing in tune, knowing your rhythm, knowing a bit about poetry, about finger-picking. I put a saddle on them and ride them into town. “As a wrangler, I have skills to get these wild beasts out of the wilderness. “I see these songs and they're like, 'Can you show me to the world?'. “The songs are these wild horses that I can see in the distance,” he says. There’s nothing uniform about the way his ideas present themselves, it’s up to him to capture the I may be avoiding it but for some reason I can tell the song.”īutler sees songwriting in a unique way. ![]() “When I can't even admit it to myself, I can admit it to a song. It's always been my mate who I can tell anything to, when I couldn't tell anything to anybody else. Something happens inside of him when Butler is writing a song. It gets distilled into this story or this song.” Sometimes it's months or years of consideration and conversations and thinking about something. “It's the most considered and positive way that I process my stuff. “It was always my good friend who I could tell everything to, and it still is. “I was always writing music as a journal entry just to kind of express how I felt about myself within this world,” he says. As his career has progressed, he’s come to realise that songwriting has always been a way for him to understand and perhaps even temper some of his anxieties and strong emotions. John Butler is the first to acknowledge that he can be an intense guy. That wasn't the dream.” Riding wild horses into town Most people want to do it from the time they are a teenager, I had no interest in being a rock star or anything like that. “It was when I was 21 that I decided to do music as a serious thing. All of a sudden, I realised that this guitar knew what I was gonna do way before I ever did. “When I was 21, I discovered open-tuning,” he says. Screw the guitar.' So I put the guitar away for like a year.”īut guitar came back in a big way when Butler discovered some of the old blues traditions that fit so well with his grandfather’s old instrument. “So, he stopped teaching me but kept on teaching all my friends. “I went to a guitar teacher for a while, but I was massively into wanting to be a professional skateboarder and he didn't like that,” he recalls. ![]() “My grandmother saw that and gave me the guitar.”ĭespite this connection, and in contrast to just about every other teenage boy on the planet, John Butler had no aspirations whatsoever to become a musician. “I came along as a bumbling teenager who liked playing guitar, there was always one around, and the guitar was always there for me, it was a friend who could help me get out all the things I was going through. It became like this Excalibur in our family. The only thing left of him was this guitar. “He was this legendary man who died in a bush-fire and left our whole family widowed. ![]() My grandmother said to all her eight children, whoever learns how to play the guitar will receive their father's guitar. “My grandfather died in 1958, but he played a slide dobro, resophonic guitar. “The guitar was just always around,” he says. His style seemingly inspired equally by classic rock and psych as it is traditional fingerstyle blues playing. For many years now, critics and fans have held him up as one of the country’s most formidable axe-slingers. Less familiar is Butler’s relationship with the guitar. That really made me realise that these were my people.” Freak songs written by freaks for freaks. “If you were on the outside of the cool kids, if you were an outcast, if you were alternative in the late 80s and early 90s, that was a pivotal album. “After I got that out of my system, the first album that really nailed me and made me feel like I wasn't alone was Violent Femmes – Violent Femmes. “My first cassette was Slippery When Wet by Bon Jovi," he says. John Butler’s earliest musical inspirations will seem very familiar to those who grew up in the late 80s and early 90s. To help us do so, Butler himself dropped by Double J to chat to Gemma Pike about his life in music the successes, the struggles and the reason writing songs is more important to him now than ever. In 2019, we celebrated the two-decade long career of modern Australian bluesman John Butler for The J Files. From his biggest inspirations to the songs that still mean so much
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