Acclaimed Australian musician John Butler has a simple message for Toronto: He wants his shirt back.
“I lost a really great denim shirt at my last Toronto gig,” says Butler, on the phone from his home in Western Australia, before going on to applaud Hogtown audiences for their passion and enthusiasm. No, really! Apparently at John Butler shows, Torontonians forget the whole sit on our hands, stand 15 feet back from the stage rule.
“You might take awhile to warm up. We have to prove ourselves a little bit, but you’re not just standing there with crossed arms stroking your goatees,” says Butler. “Toronto is a little more instinctive and primal as opposed to arty-farty. I don’t mind some of that, but at the same time you have to shake your booty.”
Toronto fans should begin prepping their aforementioned booties, as Butler will be back in town tomorrow (Feb. 6) in support of his new and sixth studio album, Flesh & Blood.
Butler’s story is an interesting one. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, Calif., before his family moved to the small town of Pinjarra in Western Australia when Butler was 11 years old. As the legend goes, Butler’s grandfather was a fine musician and bequeathed his prized slide guitar to any one of his eight children that managed to learn to play it. It didn’t happen, of course, until little Johnny Butler started banging out AC/DC on the guitar as any fine upstanding Aussie teen is want to do.
“It has been the Excalibur of our family. There were eight uncles and aunts, and they never learned how to play, and here I was some pimply faced kind of goofball, 16 years old with no interest at all in a slide guitar,” says Butler. “I just wanted to learn Jane’s Addiction songs, but I lucked out and pulled the sword out of the rock.”
Butler started busking on the streets of Fremantle before forming the John Butler Trio and releasings his self-titled debut in 1998. He is already the top independent recording artist in Australia, and his star status is on a serious upward trajectory following the succes of his last album, April’s Uprising.
Flesh & Blood marks a return to what Butler calls “experiential” music.
“The last album, we cut the fat off all the songs to just lyrics and chords, cut all the instrumental, experiential part out of it,” says Butler.
“Now it was time to put the musicianship back into it. The biggest thing was putting that textural feely-ness back into the songs.” And, considering Butler is a seriously accomplished guitar player, that is a good thing.
“We wanted the grooves to get deeper and thicker, and as a songwriter, I wanted the songs to be a lot more guttural and fleshier,” Butler continues. “I wanted to smell it and feel it a bit more.”
Although he loves to tinker in the studio, Butler thrives onstage and works hard to engage an audience and take them on a journey.
“I love that journey of a song and I’m struck by the absolute kind of almost addiction, searching for the next hit of that collaborative churchlike moment,” says Butler.
You heard him, Toronto.
