John
O
n paper, it seemed like a brilliant
plan — Down Under folk-rocker
John Butler permanently trading
his urban digs in Fremantle for the relative
wilderness of the southern countryside
where he grew up. It wasn’t exactly as
he’d remembered it. Sure, the wild kanga-
underneath his fingernails — which he
usually keeps sharpened to a fine finger-
picking point — began to coax an album
out of him and his John Butler Trio, aptly
titled Home and featuring reflective mate-
rial like “We Want More” and “You Don’t
Have To Be Angry anymore.” It’s a hard-
won effort, put together over several dis-
parate sessions, and often without his
band on site for backup. But Butler is so
adamant about clarifying every last step
he took, that he wrote his own intricate,
sprawling biography for his label,
Nettwerk. ”I hope you were able to make
your way through the whole document —
I’m sure it wasn’t easy,” he snickers.
John Butler
ILLINOIS ENTERTAINER: So going home
didn’t have the desired effect on you, cre-
01•2019
roos and cockatoos that already called his
property home were a refreshing sight for
him and his vocalist wife, Danielle
Caruana, when they first arrived. “And it
was great to see all this greenery around
for once, and we even bought a dog, which
was lovely,” he rhapsodizes. “But I live on
seven acres, and there is just so much to
look after there, like digging ditches,
building gardens, fixing irrigation, chop-
ping firewood. It was overwhelming.”
Butler swears that he’s never heard the old
Tom Wolfe adage, ‘You can’t go home
again.’ But he gets the subtle enormity of
its inferences. He really gets it. And some-
how, getting a little manual-labor dirt
atively?*
JOHN BUTLER: Well, your home — wher-
ever it is in your life, be it physical, mental,
or spiritual — I personally think that you
need to find it within you. So going home
did work in a lot of ways. It’s just that
maybe when you go home, you have to go
in and see what’s inside the house,
because sometimes what’s inside your
house will need a spring cleaning. And
sometimes that spring cleaning isn’t as
pleasant as you would want it to be. But —
at least for me - I wasn’t coming home to
escape. I was coming home to return. And
sometimes, hey — your house just needs
to be cleaned up.
8 illinoisentertainer.com january 2019
IE: Why move in the first place?
JB: I grew up in the country, and this place
is actually about two hours from where I
grew up — it’s in the same region. But it
was actually my wife’s idea to move to the
country. She said, “Are we gonna stay in
the city, year after year? Is that what we
planned?” Then we started thinking about
it, more and more. And seeing how much
both travel as touring musicians, having
an idyllic place to come back to that’s
nothing but nature? We both thought that
sounded amazing. Like, right now I’m on
a tour bus in the middle of downtown
Cincinnati, and this is where I’m living,
you know? So to come back to something
that was an antidote to that became a real-
ly strong compulsion for both of us. So we
went back to the country. So it wasn’t as
black and white as you would imagine.
And it did light a spark in me. And it start-
ed with the moment I stopped the actual
working and touring and got things
caught up. Which was actually a beautiful
place to get to. I just wasn’t expecting anx-
iety to come and smash me in the face like
it did. But I was distracted. Every day, I
was cutting wood, and I spent ages mak-
ing this raised garden, and I landscaped
the whole thing, and I was making friends