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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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