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John Butler Trio

Los Angeles-born guitarist John Butler was raised in Pinjarra, Western Australia. When John was the first child in the family to learn guitar after his grandfather died, his grandmother handed down to John her husband's lap steel guitar. His grandfather, also John Butler, died in the 1952 Nannup forest fires in Western Australia.

It took a while for that guitar to shape the younger John Butler's music career. At sixteen he started strumming on it. In his early twenties, after modifying his grandfather's guitar slightly, he started playing it in public, busking in Fremantle with a battery powered amp he borrowed off a friend. But his main guitar , then and now is the guitar he bought through the musician who taught John for five months, an old Washburn 12 String acoustic.

On the streets of Fremantle John Butler improvised on the instrumentals which distilled into the instrumental tape 'Searching For Heritage'. The healthy sales of that tape while busking, plus unemployment benefits helped pay for 1998's selftitled first album. the music style is born out of everrything he's heard and enjoyed, from Black Sabbath to Fleetwood Mac to Jeff Lang. The songs speak about life and issues. He's been labelled a "hippy".

The end of the busking days also called for the formation of the John Butler Trio with Gavin Shoestring on bass and Jason McGann at the drumkit - one of the busiest bands in the land, headlining shows and playing at almost every festival going. The band's recording debut came in the form of the John Butler Three EP in 2000. By the time the album 'Three' was released, the word was out. Triple J was giving high rotation treatment to the 'Three' track 'Betterman', and the independently-distributed CD landed the John Butler Trio on the official national sales charts.

During 2001/02 the group recorded 4 gigs, 2 in Melbourne and 2 in West Australia.. John chose 13 songs from those shows to release and included one studio song, 'Home Is Where the Heart Is' to what became 'Living 2001-2002', another huge success for the fiercely independent John Butler Trio. To quote John Butler: "Surfing's not about being sponsored, and music's not about being signed".

The six months John Butler took off before tackling what became 'Sunrise Over Sea' was highly significant. It wasn't the same John Butler who returned to the studio. He'd taken that time off to prepare for, and enjoy, the birth of his first child. He came back to the studio inspired with thoughts of wife Danielle and daughter Banjo. He started work without the rest of the last-known John Butler Trio line-up. The way the new album unfolded he could have released it as John Butler, with backing musicians, not as the Trio. But he'd worked too long establishing the name and the music was meant to be played live

'Sunrise Over Sea' entered the national album charts at No.1, just the second independent Australian album to achieve the top spot, after You Am I's 'Hourly Daily' eight years earlier. The single, 'Zebra' won John Butler the prestigious APRA Song Of The Year award.

If 'Sunrise Over Sea' could have been a solo album, 2007's was everything but. The creation of 2007's 'Grand National' involved a cast of "thousands", including strings and brass, and backing vocals from wife Danielle and Vika and Linda Bill of Black Sorrows fame. Marriage and the birth of his two children had shown John that he was a member of a family, his immediate family, his family of musicians and also a global family. That thought inspired the title of the album. Somewhere between 22 to 25 songs were considered for this album, some created during or before 'Sunrise Over Sea'.

In March 2008 John Butler announced that after six years drummer Michael Barker and bass player Shannon Birchall would play their last shows with The John Butler Trio in April and Butler would seek new band mates as he begins work on his fifth studio album. In June 2009 the new members of the trio - Melbourne musician Nicky Bomba – his wife Danielle’s brother who was the principal drummer on 'Sunrise Over Sea', and Sydney musician Byron Luiters – entered the recording studio to start work on the group’s next album.

While taking part in the television documentary series ‘Who Do You Think You Are’, tracing his ancestry, John Butler learned that his forebears had played a significant role in  the 1876 ‘April Uprising’, an important event in Bulgarian history, inspiring the name of the John Butler Trio’s fifth studio album. The revised line-up recorded 22 tracks at Fremantle, then cut them down to 15 as the tracklist for the final album, ready for April 2010 release.

 

 

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