Bio : John Butler

John Butler had fucking had enough. It must have been sometime in 2021, with the world still trying to wobble to its feet amid a pandemic haze. After nearly two decades of hard touring, the singer had disbanded his long-running John Butler Trio, the band that helped make him not only one of Australia’s musical icons but also one of its biggest exports ever. 

Despite a contentious lifelong relationship shaped in part by violence and abuse, his dying father had moved into his bedroom, Butler sleeping on the couch as he tried his hand at palliative care. His wife, Danielle, was across the country, tending to her ailing father, too. Having endured the tension of decades on the road and the strong wills of two energetic creative halves, their relationship was now faltering. And finally, the home studio that Butler had at last upgraded so he could make music alone—without the interference and anxiety of involving anyone else—broke, his recording rig stalling so that he could no longer work at all. His solace became his stressor, and he thought the time had come, just maybe, to quit.

But then he asked for help. Butler rendezvoused with James Ireland, a member of Pond and a crucial part of a younger Australian cadre surging to international attention. They cut “King of California,” a radiant celebration song of sorts for Butler’s perseverant journey with Danielle, and Butler realized anew the magic that making music when it felt good could hold. Rather than dip, he theorized the most ambitious artistic plan of his 30-year career: a four-album cycle that allowed him to restart in a place of pure tone and culminate, three records and several years later, with another band of his own. He would call it all Four Seasons. The third volume, PRISM, may be the most candid, poignant and powerful record of his life, proof that to get back to something we believe in we sometimes have to start, once again, from next to nothing.

Before we get there, though, let’s revisit Butler’s illustrious past and the sometimes-faulty perceptions it created: Born in California to parents descended from proud European radicals, Butler moved to the far reaches of Western Australia just before he became a teenager. After later stints in American rock bands, he returned to Australia and began busking in the markets of Fremantle. He became an unlikely DIY sensation, selling more than 3,000 copies of a self-made cassette featuring his intensely rhythmic and compulsory guitar pieces.  

The John Butler Trio soon pushed that sound even harder, its exploratory mix of punk and pop, reggae and jazz, acoustic textures and electric energy slowly building into a transcontinental sensation. The Trio won most every accolade in Australian entertainment—multiple AIR Awards and APRAs, a new clutch of ARIA Awards almost every time they released a new record. Butler’s decision to start his own label, Jarrah, in 2002 paved the way for Australian bands in the decades since to believe that they could do the same. It didn’t, after all, hamper his success, since Butler was the first independent artist to have a No. 1 record in Australia—to have several that went Gold and Platinum and No. 1, in fact. His rippling 12-string instrumental, “Ocean,” became a kind of Australian anthem, while the Trio’s string of singles— “What You Want,” “Revolution,” “Better Than,” and “Zebra” just for starters—suggested a band that was inspirational, elastic, and singular.  Butler has one million album sales to his name, and is one of the most played artists ever on Australian radio.  

Butler’s success didn’t just stay on the island. In the States, for instance, the Trio has sold out Red Rocks several times and the Beacon Theater, alongside nearly every other major theater and amphitheater. Heavy US touring included numerous runs with Dave Matthews Band, and Dispatch, with sold out shows at Madison Square Garden.  They became, though, perhaps overly associated with languid days by the beach, an all-vibes act that was actually singing about climate change, political unrest, and mental turmoil all along. A committed activist his entire career, that disconnect gradually wore on Butler, a colossal guitarist and radical thinker who offered more than facile life-is-good sloganeering.

When the band finally began a hiatus after a major American tour in 2019, Butler knew he wanted to try something different. He’d long been fascinated by the endlessness of New Age music, how its composers could sink into pieces with a goal that wasn’t commercial but only salubrious—that is, how can this music help me and you? After he cut that track with Ireland and re-realized the value of a good engineer, he asked multi-instrumentalist Dave Mann to join him in his studio for the 10 days of meditative music that led to last year’s exquisite Running River, 100 minutes of gentle rhythms and expansive tones. He then decamped to the New Mexico studio of old friend KT Tunstall, sequestering himself in her new room to cut a series of six wide-eyed and vital instrumentals that bounced back to his earliest days of making music, simply because he loved it and needed to survive. That was last year’s Still Searching, its sound and title intentional nods to Searching for Heritage, the tape that launched his career nearly 30 years earlier.

Back to now and back to PRISM: Having rebuilt his foundation with two wordless albums, Butler reconvened with Ireland, hoping to revisit those songs that had crashed his recording rig amid the pandemic and finally get them right. They spent nearly two weeks working until, very late one night, Butler sat on his back porch to evaluate the sessions so far. He realized, yet again, it was all wrong. He and Ireland had jumped directly into the deep end, adding synths and beat machines and a panoply of other sounds before they managed to find the basic rhythm of the guitar, long the bedrock of Butler’s world. It was as if he’d overlooked the elemental lesson of Running River and Still Searching—to begin simply and build from there. And so, they began again.

PRISM is the urgent work of someone with a lot to say, with emotional terrain to explore and the understanding that music is still maybe the best way he’s ever found to do so. These dozen songs fall loosely into three compelling categories. First, Butler doubles down on his activism for nearly half the record, criticizing mega-corporations upending the earth and celebrating the natural wonder that remains. Where “Wings to Fly” is a spoken-sung tirade over undulating synths that recall the later works of fellow Australian Nick Cave, “Outta My Head” is a spring-loaded rock song about fending off the craziness of our post-truth oblivion. These songs are righteous reflections of our time and warnings about what we stand to lose. 

Two stirring tunes about his father’s life death hold the center. “Leave the Rest to Earth” contemplates the slipstream of time that loss can render, the way it makes the fundamentals of belief falter. It is a preamble to “Let Yourself Go,” a devastating contemplation of Butler’s struggle to hold a sacred space for his father and his care even as he reckons with the damage he did not only with his life but with the way it ended. It is the longest song here, as Butler gives himself time to contemplate how to rush out of his past and into his future. All electronic phosphorescence and rhythmic melee, its instrumental middle maps Butler’s battle.

The most winning vein, though, may be his songs of honest reconciliation with Danielle. He leaps out of these troubled times with opener “Trippin’ on You,” a bounding bit of piano pop that repurposes his father’s relationship advice to realize that his marriage can endure this challenge, that it can even evolve. It’s the sort of song that the Trio never could have made or that a younger and less experienced Butler could have made, either. It all culminates in closer “King of California,” that first tune Butler tracked with Ireland. On a record that is so real about hardship, Butler is ultra-candid here, confessing his faults and failures and then reaching for his relationship like the life raft it has long been.

Butler turned 50 not long after PRISM was finished.  He sees that as nothing but a blessing. He has been making music, writing songs, and, most importantly, living and dealing with his life long enough to know better who and how he wants to be. Eventually he will move into the fourth season, likely with his band.  But back in the present, these dozen songs are as rich as marrow, cut directly from experience and translated into music that is magnetic from the first listen.  But it is not so much an ending as the close of a new beginning for Butler. He is now fully aware that he has not yet had enough, because this is just a start.