Australian for music: Finger-picking Aussie to join G. Love & Special Sauce at AMP
Posted on Friday, August 22, 2008
He may have an American birth certificate, but John Butler's accent tells a different story.
The son of an Australian father and an American mother, Butler moved with his family when he was 11-years old from Torrance, Calif., to Pinjarra in Western Australia. Although he has spent two-thirds of his life Down Under, Butler said some of his American traits never faded -- even if his dialect did.
"Kind of an optimistic point of view, an idea that we can achieve everything,"said Butler, while in Boston preparing a show.
That mindset has paid off for the specialist on the 12-string electric acoustic guitar, which he called "very dynamic." When Butler heads to the Arkansas Music Pavilion in Fayetteville for a show Tuesday night along with his band, The John Butler Trio, he will do so as a self-made man living the American, err, Australian dream.
"Expect a journey. Expect to be inspired,"Butler said of Tuesday's performance, which will open for the Philadelphia-founded G. Love & Special Sauce.
Butler's journey continued as a 16-year-old, when he first started flirting with music, a movement spurred on by receiving his grandfather's dobro dating back to the 1930s. He then developed what can best be described as a hybrid picking method by using one of his fingernails as a flat pick.
"It's my own style,"he said.
He took to the streets of Fremantle, a town south of the much larger metropolis of Perth on the continent's western coast along the Indian Ocean, with a guitar and a desire to mix various genres of music such as Celtic folk and Indian ragas into something not easily classifiable.
"I'm not a music classifier. I'm a musician,"he would later say.
He is, though, an entrepreneur. His first recording was a completely self-funded operation in which he sold about 3,500 cassette tapes of his work in 1996. That capital allowed him to fund his first CD recording.
After gaining an Australian following using several different bassists and drummers to fill out The John Butler Trio, the band's namesake was able to form his own record company, Jarrah Records, in 2002. As his albums started enjoying platinum success he began setting precedents of success for Australian artists on independent labels. Eventually, his group, which is also composed of bassist Shannon Birchall and drummer Michael Barker, started touring with the likes of such American notaries as the Dave Matthews Band and John Mayer, largely because of the radio play of the hit "Zebra"off the 2004 album "Sunrise Over Sea."
Butler's current tour, which also features up-and-coming San Diego bluesy songstress Tristan Prettyman, is a collaboration of -- in his words -- "mutual admiration"of G. Love & Special Sauce, a band he has been following for about 12 years.
Before hopping a plane, he decided to change his look by chopping off his signature long dreadlocks.
"I didn't like them anymore,"said Butler, who added that his group hopes to release a new album either in late 2009 or early 2010. "I looked in the mirror and said this is not what I want on my head. For 13 years, I had the same hairstyle."
Although Butler is known internationally for his music, a trip to the states represents a vacation of sorts, an opportunity to travel with his family without the mega-celebrity status he has back home. A quick search on YouTube will find one of the continent's biggest musical highlights from last year: a guitar duet with a fellow member of Aussie music royalty, Keith Urban, playing the Trio's "Funky Tonight"at the Australian Recording Industry Association Awards.
Still, Butler said he's "not part of the celebrity scene"in Australia.
"It's a good thing to be able to turn on new people,"he said of his current American tour. "I'm an under-the-radar kind of guy. My music speaks for me."
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