The John Butler Trio is a band that’s hard to peg down when it comes to musical genres. While the band has been coined a "jam band" and has the musical chops to carry on lengthy musical sessions, frontman John Butler has a problem being pigeonholed into that category. He is one of many artists these days that believe that the song has to be strong with or without an abundance of solos. With his ability to play everything from guitar and banjo to harmonica and didgeridoo, the result is a fascinating one that touches on reggae, bluegrass, and seemingly everything in between.
Butler's latest record Grand National is a perfect example of his eclectic styles, and you'll usually find his trademark fingerpicking technique always lurking underneath. Butler talked with UG writer Amy Kelly recently to discuss his development as a musician and as a social activist.
UG: I noticed that there is usually about a 3-year gap between studio albums for you. Is it usually the songwriting process that causes it to take a bit more time?
John: Usually we’re just on tour so much. We would have recorded probably a lot earlier with Grand National, but the fact was that we released some of that CD in Australia. Then a year or a year and a half later we released it in America and France, so we had that whole cycle again to sort of do justice by that album. It’s the same with the last album, where we just kind of get in these long cycles for whatever reason. The last time I had a kid and changed my band. It’s not intentional. We could record a lot quicker, but things always seem to happen. Pretty worthy things like touring or whatever it might be, babies. So I don’t think the next album will be so long in between.
Because you are on the road so much, is it safe to assume that you do most of your songwriting on the road?
Yeah, totally. Too much! I constantly download. I’m not always writing, but I’m just kind of collecting. Sometimes I’ll write a song in a night and then something takes me 4 years to finish. It depends. There’s a lot of different songwriting cycles going on at once.
“Funky Tonight” has such fantastic layering, with what sounds like multiple guitars and a banjo. Did you initially come up with chords to get that one started or perhaps a banjo line?
It all gets written pretty much on the guitar. I’ll add banjo just for fun, just to add another dimension here and there for fun. But it’s all kind of based around that guitar. I kind of write in a very, I’d say, rhythmic section kind of way. I’m writing bass lines and rhythms within my guitar piece. So sometimes it makes it harder to find pieces for drums and bass to go with because I’m already kind of playing those parts.
When I wrote “Funky Tonight,” I obviously kind of wrote it around that picking that was kind of like a skank, like a ska. It has that fast skank offbeat, as well as the bass line. So I was just thinking kind of like ska, bluegrass stuff. I wasn’t thinking just bluegrass and I wasn’t just thinking ska. I like to hear both of them. Also from the guitar there are so many things that I hear when I’m playing my guitar and we just try to add to it from there. Actually, it’s quite simple the arrangement usually. It’s not a complex kind of arrangement.
You do play a lot differently than many guitarists out there, particularly with your picking style. Were you ever hesitant to go down a different route?
I started playing guitar when I was 15, but I only really got into kind of writing from the guitar-playing aspect when I was 21. But I’ve always been attracted to fingerpicking styles, but also banjo, bluegrass. I’m influenced by a lot of percussive styles of playing. I was more hesitant on the blues. I didn’t like the blues because I only heard 12-bar blues all my life. I thought it was really boring. I thought, “Well, I guess I don’t like blues.”
Then I started hearing all different types of blues like Jeff Lang and Mississippi John Hurt and Muddy Waters. Some real early old-styles blues and country blues, and I suddenly realized that I really liked the sound of that slide playing and started picking up the slide and open tuning when I was 21.
I kind of got addicted to guitar for a couple of years and stopped writing. I started playing in an instrumental band. As I started getting more gigs, I really wanted to start fusing the instrumental playing and the songwriting again because I think where it’s really at, where the song is. I think it was watching people Johnny McManus and Jeff Lang. They’re extraordinary guitarists, and at the same time, great songwriters. That’s when I thought, “Okay, I’m going to bring the songwriting back into what I do.” I was never hesitant. It was just that I didn’t really have any plans. I never really planned to do this. Only when I was 21 did I go right into music and do it for a long time.
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| "I started learning how to play that instrument when I was 21 and I'm still really learning how to play it." |
You’ve said in past interviews that inheriting your grandfather’s dobro was a bit turning point in your life. What was it about that event that had such a huge effect on you?
It’s something that keeps on making more and more sense as I get older. At the start, to tell you the truth, I started playing guitar and my grandma gave me the guitar. I had this guitar teacher who kept on teaching all my friends because I was more into skateboarding! I wanted to be a professional skateboarder. So he stopped teaching me because I guess I wasn’t into it enough or something. So I quit the guitar for a year and I put the dobro under my bed. It was like I had to be a guitarist. It was a strange thing. I thought I was just an artist. So I stopped.
Then I got a great guitar teacher named Ori. I started learning again because I wanted to learn. I bought a 12-string. It was the first guitar I actually bought. I was interested in songs like “Jolene” by Dolly Parton and songs by Jane’s Addiction, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin. I guess that’s where my fingerpicking kind of started. I just love that sound of “Jolene.” It’s just amazing sounding. As much as I was liking Soundgarden and Pearl Jam and all my other Jimi Hendrix, I was just loving that lush sound of finger picking.
Then I started playing live with open turning. Then all of the sudden I got into that and slide. All of the sudden the dobro started making a lot more sense to me. I was like, “Oh, okay. Now I get it.” I started learning how to play that instrument when I was 21 and I’m still really learning how to play it. I play lapsteel, but then you see a really good lapsteel player! I have a long way to go and that’s exciting.
You’ve got a video of “Ocean” up on your MySpace right now that really shows how amazing your playing skills are. What kind of practicing regimen did you have to get to a level of playing like that?
When I discovered open tuning, I found out that I had this voice that really suited the streets I thought. This instrumental voice, that I kind of grew up watching every time I went to see these artists play these great instrumentals on dulcimers and hammered dulcimers and all kinds of stuff. All of the sudden I had something that I thought made sense within the culture, that street culture.
So I started busting my butt off. I quit the university and just busted my butt. I played like 8 hours every day, every weekend. That’s why I wrote that song actually. That’s where it started. Years ago I wrote that song. But as I grow, the song kind of grows as well. The song is sort of a musical documentary of who I am or what’s going on for me. That’s kind of the song in a lot of ways. But it keeps on changing. It could move to something else.
You touch upon so many different genres. Do you usually know when you’re first sitting down to write a song whether it will touch on a certain genre like reggae or Celtic?
Most of the songwriting starts off with an instrument, whether it’s banjo, slide guitar, or 12-string. Because I grew up loving so many different styles, from reggae to Black Sabbath to Celtic instrumentals, a lot of times they all kind of come out at once. It’s like all 3 different styles trying to get out of the same door at once. A lot of times I’m picking and I’m hearing a reggae thing - and I’m also hearing an Indian, Celtic kind of vibe. Sometimes I’m hearing a hip-hop beat behind it. So I’m writing to a hip-hop beat and doing a fingerpicking kind of thing - but the swing is more hip-hop. The mode is more Celtic. That’s kind of where I’m coming from. I love hearing different rhythms.
I’m addicted to rhythm. That’s how I play the guitar. Between the 2 hands, it’s like drumming on the skin. It kind of jams together to kind of create a melody, rhythm, bass, percussion all in one, which makes it interesting to add all those things to it. It can make it a little bit too busy. On the last album it was like, “Well, you’re playing the bass line, John. What do I play?” Sometimes we have to find something in between the melody and the bass line to make it work, which is really cool. It’s fun to do that.
Which song in particular were you taking over the bass line on your guitar?
“Devil Running” in particular. It was kind of all there. The drum beat, the bass line, and the melody were all there. I slightly changed what I did to be less bass-line like. Shannon suggested something a little bit more longer, a bass line/melody. When you listen to reggae, everybody is taking their part in a circle rhythm. No one is actually playing the same thing and I kind of like that. I guess I kind of like that for us. I’ll play one rhythm and Shannon will kind of come up on another rhythm and then Mike comes in with another. Between all of us, we kind of create one kind of larger sound. It’s kind of hard to explain. I’m the kind of person who picks up guitar and show people. It makes so much more sense!
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| "I write about the human condition and I'm inspired by the human condition." |
Your band has often been given the title of “jam band.” Would you say that’s an accurate description?
To me, I kind of find the term jam band to be really limiting. It seems to be one type of people’s music, which I think our music is for everybody. It crosses so many genres and it’s still very song-driven. Jam band never really sits well with me when describing my music. But I do allow for spontaneity and for something to come from improvising in the studio and in the rehearsals and sometimes onstage. A lot of our songs do grow into quite complex arrangements from improvising. When something really works as improvising, I tend to think we should do that every time because that really works. Some people can say that takes away the spontaneity and something else really good could come in.
I think music should really be self-indulgent, but not to the point where you disrespect the song. First and foremost, it’s about the song. No matter what the improvising is, it all has to serve the song. Sometimes I get the impression that jam band kind of means it’s not about the song and it’s about whatever happens. I think I fit more on the songwriting side, maybe more on the Jimi Hendrix side of things. Where it’s really around the song, but there’s room to improvise. Not that I’m anything like Hendrix! I’m not even comparing!
You focus a lot of attention on writing lyrics that touch on social and cultural concerns. For example in “Gov Did Nothing,” you talk about the lack of response to Hurricane Katrina.
Like a lot of things, I think Katrina, 9-11, the war in Iraq, there are things that impact you so intensely emotionally that they throw you for a while. With Katrina and 9-11, those are things that moved me deeply and they were so doubled-edged that it took me a while to write about them. But instantly things were happening. I’m kind of always writing and downloading. Sometimes it takes a lot to come in before there’s a song there. Sometimes there’s just a melody. Sometimes it’s a rhythm. Sometimes it’s me just really pissed off. But all those things really kind of build up into something and they stick around. All of the sudden there’s something to build the song upon.
With something like 9-11, I had written the song a year or so ago, but it took me 3 or 4 years to write about it. There are so many doubled-edged swords at that time that I just had to really sit with it. Katrina was the same way. I write about things that deeply move me, whether it’s something like “Caroline” where I sing about teen suicide or a “Gov Did Nothing” or “Devil Running” about Iraq or 9-11 or “Daniella” about my wife. Anything that moves me deeply, I’ll write about it. It doesn’t always have to be in a subjective way. Sometimes it’s a very 3rd person kind of way like “Caroline” was.
You also carry that concern over to playing festivals like Live Earth, which raises awareness about global warming.
When I decided to have a career and take my music outside of my house and outside of my living room and into people’s spaces like bars and stuff, I was also part of a campaign to stop a lot of the destruction of the forests in southwest Australia. A lot of big businesses were going down to really special places, sacred places that should protected, and trashing them for money. I have a big issue with justice and equality and respect, more so than I do with politics in the environment and the -isms. I have a problem with people doing the wrong thing and getting away with it, and everybody paying the fine for it.
So being a part of that campaign and being inspired by so many activists, I was trying to make the decision of what I wanted to do. If I wanted to be a professional musicians or be a full-time activist. I decided to do both of them because leaving one of them out wasn’t going to satisfy me. I think there are a lot of great mothers out there that are activists and raising the future. They’re raising good children that won’t be liabilities. That’s an activist. To recycle or buying the right things, that’s being active. It’s about having common sense. So I write about them because they move me deeply. It’s good to be a part of a positive movement and change on this planet.
At the same time, there are a lot of limiting things that seem to come from it at times. People think it’s protest music or this or that. I always find that really funny because I’m just writing how I feel about something or how I see it happening. I do think some art should reflect the society that it’s written in or created in. How can you not create art at this moment and time without talking about the destruction of the planet or the war in Iraq or the loss of rights of workers and all these things?
It’s not a political thing. It’s a human thing. It’s just as important as love. It’s just as important as romance or dancing. I really do think all those things are just as important. A good DJ can make the world a better place. I know, I’ve been there! A whole room of people are very happy and leave the dancefloor or club better than they walked in. That’s like church. I write about the human condition and I’m inspired by the human condition.
When you look back at Grand National, are you still seeing yourself grow as a musician?
I just want to see a movement, an evolution of some sort. I listen back to my first albums, and I think they’re as good as my last album as far as where I was at. When you listen to an album of an artist, you actually get to know where you’re at. I’m getting inspired by more bands, whether it’s listening to a really great drum beat under a Shakira song or listening to a great reggae band that I don’t know the name of on the street. I’m constantly downloading that stuff and thinking of how to make good music.
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