Butch
gonna be great like THIS!” And a lot of times
I really do enjoy it when people give me the
keys to drive, and they come back the next
day and let me play them something I’ve
done. And that’s not always gonna be the
case, but it kind of nice to get people to trust
in you that much. Where you can see something
and get closer to the finish line by leaving
you alone in your sandbox to build the
ultimate sand castle in.
Butch Walker
Photos: Phil Chester & Sara Byrne
good, and it’ll have THIS vibe.” And a lot of
people just don’t have that. So I think it’s no
different from being a house designer, like an
interior decorator, where they can go into an
ugly, beat-up ‘70s house with linoleum floors
and shitty wallpaper and outdated appli-
IE: You made Green Day sound Gary-
Glitter huge on Father of All Motherfuckers.
BW: Ha! Love Gary Glitter or hate him — and
he’s very hatable at this point — there was
some good music there. And cool production.
And a lot of that ‘70s glam era is in my wheel-
06•2020
ances, and they can go, “Oh, this is gonna be
AMAZING!” And you look at it and go,
“How? How is this gonna be amazing?” But
if you can see the vision before you start, then
that’s 50% of the battle right there.
IE: I think it was Brian Fallon’s song
“Smoke,” where he gave you a bare-bones
acoustic track one night, and overnight you
turned it into a stomping hoedown.
BW: Yeah! For sure! I think more than anything
it was just like being able to — again —
take a song that was just his guitar and
vocals, and say, “Oh, man — I think it’s
house, from just growing up and loving it
and making a lot of tributes, productionwise,
just on my own records. That was also
alot of Bille Joe Armstrong’s influences. And
like I’ve told people before, half of making a
record is just talking with the artist before
you even start the record. So Billie and I
would spend a lot of time just shooting the
shit — over texting and over phone calls —
and we had all the same records, we had the
same exact influences. He’s very much a
musicologist, and knows every guitar player
on every record, and I love that. So not only
was it like, “Did we just become best
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illinoisentertainer.com june 2020