Sat in a bar in London, the 26 year old looks like your typical singer-songwriter trying to make it in the music industry. Half long hair in a bun. A guitar next to him. A laptop on the table in front of him (probably with Facebook open). And a pint of beer in hand.
But Rory Butler is much more than that.
His story starts with his parents and the recording studio they used to own in their basement. As a wee child (he is from Scotland after all), Rory and his brother Sandy used to record lots of stuff in the studio, a lot of which his brother has archived. To the question what songs written at the age of seven are about, he answers: “I don’t know what they’re about, it’s actually quite scary, Sandy got them out not long ago and we were listening to it and I was listening to the lyrics and I thought to myself ‘Wow, that kid is really fucked’, it’s terrible”.
All he could really say on what the songs were about is that they weren’t particularly inspiring, but that they were surprisingly out of the box for the thoughts of a seven year old. A bit later he mentioned that the lyrics were probably copied from songs that they listened to a lot growing up, and that this still happens today, he says: “I’ll be writing a song and then think that I’ve got my next great hit sorted out and then I realise that it’s actually a Rihanna song or a Beyoncé line already, so I’m fucked and I have to give it up and start again.”
Giving it up and having to start over again, however, isn’t something that brings Rory down. “The quality of it being hard is part of that sort of romance of what it’s like to be a musician in the music industry.” That romance including going into recording studios, recording singles, singles flopping, labels dropping, meeting A&R guys, trying to get people to see your show and get you some kind of hope that something is going to happen, and then it doesn’t happen, and you’ve got to work in a café making coffee around the clock, pouring drinks at the same time as trying to write new songs.
“I try hard not to focus on that stuff, logging into Facebook every minute of the day to see how well it’s doing. If anything comes from it, that’s great, but don’t waste time only thinking of how well it’s doing, because you’ll end up never doing it again and I don’t want that to happen.”
No, Rory Butler has plans for the future. Despite being very aware of the fact that now more than ever, people are only listening to songs and less and less people are listening to albums, he sees himself, “although I’m not one, as more of an album artist and my goal is to release several albums, every year, every year and a half, every two years, however long it takes”.
For now though, due to the expenses of being in a position where you can actually record an entire album to the quality that you want to record it at, he is just releasing singles of him and his guitar, sonically stark with beautifully raw vocals carrying each song.
“It can be really tough to fulfil the expectations of where your life is going to go, how much money you’re going to make, if you’re going to be able to save anything.”
It’s topics like these what you hear a lot on in the background of Rory Butler’s music, especially in his latest single ‘Window Shopping’, which is about how difficult it is to find employment after graduation. While most of his songs are about the struggles of being a millennial, he also has a strain of humour in his work, like in his song ‘Black and Blue’ which is about unrequited love after falling in love with a lesbian woman.
“You’ve got to come to terms with the fact that you can be happy just renting somewhere and having enough money to go out and have a few pints one or two times a week. Because it is okay.”
Rather than going through the major label route to record songs, he uses his friends and father who are willing to help him out. “We live in a time where it’s easier than ever to do a very good quality recording in your own home, and people are getting really fucking good at it, with no real training or anything like that. I think we’re entering a time where that’s a much cooler way of doing it, when you’ve gone and made your music with people that you know, your friends. It’s a lot more personal.”
That aspect of being personal is something that shines through in his onstage persona as well. He says: “I like having an audience that is listening to you and you can speak to them, make them laugh or have a conversation, and then I’ll play my music and hopefully they will enjoy it.” This is why he doesn’t always enjoy playing festivals as much as playing normal gigs.
“The audience at a festival is a little further removed from the artist, especially an acoustic artist. The sound enters this huge open space and it wanders away and it’s harder to get people to connect to it, especially for someone at my stage of the game where people often don’t know your music or who you are.”
Which is why festivals such as Live at Leeds, Stag and Dagger and The Great Escape are the perfect fit for Rory in this point of his career. He says: “They happen in venues in which gigs are normally played, so as an artist it is much more like an actual gig. It’s almost like a compromise between a normal show, at which you are able to achieve what you want, and having a festival audience who came to see a festival, not just you, so it gives you an opportunity to catch people that have never heard you before.”
If you haven’t heard Rory Butler before, make sure to listen to his music on YouTube or Spotify and catch him at the Alternative Escape on Saturday the 20th of May at Fiddlers Elbow.
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