Nylon - November 2008 - (Page 107) start to finish AFTER LOSING EVERYTHING, BUTCH WALKER STARTS AGAIN WITH HIS MOST THOUGHTFUL RECORD YET. BY MIKAEL WOOD. PHOTOGRAPHED BY DAVID REICH Butch Walker isn’t quite ready to make light of the tragedy that struck him and his family last November, when the Malibu house they were renting from Flea, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, burned to the ground during the wildfires that ravaged much of Southern California. Sitting in the home studio of his cheery new abode—according to Walker, it sits across the street from Beastie Boy Mike D’s place—the musician’s brow furrows and his tone grows ominous as he recalls speaking by phone to his pal Johnny, who was dogsitting while Walker was away on tour. The blaze was getting close, Johnny reported, and smoke was darkening the sky. “He was pretty freaked out,” Walker says. “I told him to take the dogs and leave.” What Walker is ready to do is start looking for the unexpected benefits of having all of his worldly possessions (including expensive recording gear and irreplaceable master tapes) destroyed. So far, he’s found one: “The thing I learned from this is that I didn’t really need songs from when I was 18,” he says. “Most of them sucked anyway. I don’t wanna hear ’em, just like I don’t wanna see when someone Googles me and finds a picture from when I was 18, wearing hairspray and earrings.” Walker is perhaps best known as the songwriter-producer behind hits by some of the biggest names in pop, including Avril Lavigne, Pink, and Lindsay Lohan. But since the dissolution of his late-’90s glam-grunge band the Marvelous 3 (whose “Freak of the Week” will live on in VH1 infamy), Walker has also released a string of excellent solo albums on which he’s combined a pop pro’s ear for hooks with a record nerd’s love of fuzzy guitars. His last one, 2006’s The Rise and Fall of Butch Walker and the Let’s-GoOut-Tonites, featured titles such as “Hot Girls in Good Moods” and “Too Famous to Get Fully Dressed,” which tells you a lot about Walker’s sense of humor. On his new album, Sycamore Meadows, Walker gets more serious than he ever has, complementing his big-guitar rave-ups with melancholy acoustic laments and contemplative piano ballads. The songs he was writing for the album became a way for him to deal with the tragedy, he says, and that led to a different creative process. “In the past when I was making my records, I was always like, ‘Fuck it—let’s go in the studio for two weeks and knock it out, then we’ll go on the road and it’ll be great!’ But I wanted this one to be a record that I put a little pride into. The fires made me reflect a lot and made me thankful to still be alive and have these amazing memories of my childhood. It triggered all these things that I’d never written about because I was too scared. So I did.” Losing everything eventually left Walker with a freshstart feeling that inspired him to dive back into his work. In addition to Sycamore Meadows and his contributions to Pink’s new Funhouse, he’s currently finishing up a holiday record with the female folkies associated with L.A.’s Hotel Café, and he just produced an album by young Brooklyn band the Films. “Butch likes to work fast, which I love,” says the group’s front man, Michael Trent. “We talked about what kind of record we wanted to make, got everyone on the same page, and the rest was easy.” To blow off steam, Walker likes to “play in the water” with the pro surfers in his neighborhood. “After the fire we were like, ‘Should we move to France? New York? Now’s a good time to do it, ’cause we don’t have shit to carry.’” He sighs. “I’m glad we decided to stay out here at the beach.” grooming: hee soon kwon for kiehl’s at the wall group.
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