Do you think this recording process helped you deal with that anxiety that you were feeling?

To a certain degree, definitely. I manage my anxiety now. I can see that my dad had it—now that I have it, it’s like “Oh, that’s what dad would do, that’s why he was a fucking freak.” [Laughs.] It’s come from a lot of touring, to tell you the honest truth. I first really noticed it when I was leaving home. I’d get really anxious and really grumpy and prickly and emotional, and then I’d come home and feel like it wasn’t enough time between this tour and the next tour. Then I’d get grumpy and prickly again, and all I’d see was work and mess around me. It started as touring anxiety, and then I realized it was just kind of there. So yeah, I manage it now, with fitness and meditation and just trying to be gentle with myself.

This day and age, there’s a lot of information out there, man, a lot of social media inundated by the details of the world that we didn’t really evolve to manage in our minds. A million years of evolution didn’t set us up to cope with knowing about the atrocities happening in Georgia and in America and then in Brazil and Argentina and then in Malaysia and the Philippines and then in the Middle East. The bomb that happened in Paris. There’s just so much. Every environmental disaster that’s taking place at the same time, the humanitarian disasters, all the political division, the gender division, the racial division, the religious division—I don’t think we’re meant to be able to take on all that. Maybe within our community, maybe within our state, maybe within our countries, but not globally. I do think I’m seeing this kind of anxiety take place all around me. I kind of feel like I’m just part of the zeitgeist in a lot of ways, you know?

Did you ever consider calling this a solo album and not putting it under the Trio’s name?

Yeah I did. Totally.

What made you choose the latter?

It was actually a lot of boring shit, to tell you the truth. But at the same time, some of it was realistic. I didn’t want to confuse people and make them think that this was just me and my guitar, playing and singing. And if I was to go and tour around the country with my trio and two other people—at the moment, it’s a five-piece—but under the name John Butler, the people would think they’re gonna get some intimate, unplugged theater show as opposed to The John Butler Trio. So I did it to avoid confusion. This album is wider and more expansive, and it doesn’t sound like I’m going for a laid-back solo project. And The Trio’s still featured on the album on quite a few songs.

You mentioned using GarageBand more in the writing of this record—did that contribute to more of an electronic/hip-hop influence, especially on tracks like the lead single “Home”? Was it a conscious decision to go that way with your sound here?

It’s pretty conscious. It’s something I’ve rattled on about. With [2004’s] Sunrise Over Sea, I was like, “I wanna do this reggae, hip-hop thing over this country, double-thumbing [guitar] picking thing,” being inspired by G Love and stuff. All the hip-hop I was listening to before Sunrise Over Sea was ‘90s hip-hop, and that had a lot of breaks that were looped, a lot of James Brown loops. So over the next 10 years, I still listened to hip-hop and listened to a lot of it, and a lot of the programmed beats came in and I’m kind of drawn to them. That’s what I’m hearing under what I’m doing with this folky thing. So I rattled on and on about it for a while, but a lot of times I just didn’t have access to the technology to really experiment. I guess, as a songwriter, I write in solitude—I enjoy the alchemy of writing by myself in a hotel room at four o’clock in the morning or at my house or in my shed. I like that. A lot of times in those spaces I don’t have an MPC around, so GarageBand has allowed me to do all of those things I wanted to do in such an easy way. In fact, it started on my phone. I used GarageBand on my phone and I was recording whilst driving in between shows, like “This is amazing! This is so much easier than a laptop, which is just a pain in the ass.”

And then I lost all my demos—like 13 demos for the new album—while skateboarding, because I answered my phone and put it back in my pocket, and my butt basically decided to only delete my demos. So I got the iPad and it just made it easier. I had access to all those things I had been hearing in my head. Like I would need to write a drum beat for this song, but every time I got my actual kit to try and do it, it was like, “This is a mess.” So I got on Crate Digger and got all these other hip-hop samples, and I was like, “This is it. This is what I’ve been wanting to do.” And instead of going to the bass guitar, the bass synth sounded so much better. Byron introduced that to the band two albums ago, brought that bass synth. So yeah, that’s how it came together. It was quite deliberate in that sense that—yeah, I know I can make a great live-based album if I wanted to, but that wasn’t the aesthetic of the album. I really wanted to see if I could merge these things together in a way that’s still natural and not like Frankenstein. By no means do I think I’m any kind of pioneer—there’s people like Beck who’ve been doing it beautifully for years. Beck was definitely a massive influence with this kind of thing for sure.

Your Trio is coming up on two decades as a group—do you have any sorts of thoughts on that sort of longevity, how you’ve been able to make these records for, honestly, longer than a lot of people are able to survive in the music industry?

Part of me doesn’t really subscribe to the anniversary thing in a lot of ways. It’s putting a date on what you do, and I feel like like art shouldn’t have a timecode on it. And as a artist, you don’t wanna be dated in any way. But at the same time, I’m fucking stoked to be here. You’re right—I’ve seen a lot of changes, and I’ve seen a lot of talented people come and go, without sounding too calloused. So to still be around and still be engaged, with the fan base still growing, I’m really grateful for how we did it. There’s been many times where I’m like, “I wish we were bigger sooner,” or this or that, but I’ve always said to myself that I want a long rise and a long plateau. So many people spike up out of nowhere, go worldwide platinum, and then spike down to like, “Woah, where are they? What happened?” So a long rise up and a long plateau—you don’t always get the popularity you wanted immediately. I’m thankful for how we’ve done it. I’m thankful that it happened in a really slow and natural way. And I feel like I’m getting better at it. I’m writing better songs. I’m a better performer—I’ve only really started to really enjoy playing onstage probably the last six or seven years, where it’s not stressful and the fear of failure’s not always around.

I’m glad my first couple albums weren’t huge, because I liked some of that music and still play some of it, but I think I’m writing better songs now, better poetry. I think I’m playing better guitar. This isn’t what you asked about, but one thing that I’ve definitely thought about on this album is how to keep it wild—how to keep the songs wild. Why are our favorite albums [frequently] someone’s first album? Because they weren’t thinking too much. So it’s like, “How can I think just enough to write a better song but stay naive enough to keep it wild and free?” Not too considered, just considered enough. I’m writing good music, I’m playing with a good band, there are more people than ever listening to our music, and it happened in a very natural and organic way that I’ve been able to mature with. I’m just getting a better grasp of this whole thing. I don’t think I would’ve been very good at 21 doing what I’m doing now.

Going forward, do you think the way this album came about might be the way that you approach future albums—with GarageBand and recording more by yourself instead of with the Trio?

I think I’ll try to keep a balance. I think there’s times with the Trio and what we do as a trio, that there’s no way I could replicate it anywhere else but with Grant and Byron. They’re two fantastic musicians who can literally go anywhere—so many more places than I can go. There are things that just happen—flowering, I call it, like when the flower opens, that’s what we can do with our music. It goes from being quiet to explosive, and you can’t do that with GarageBand. I definitely want to always keep aspects of that, and I definitely want to keep aspects of all the new songs. As an artist, you want to paint with the full spectrum, then that skill, that craft, that intuition, it helps with a bit of wisdom to go, “What application works here?” If you wanna draw a beautiful landscape, then don’t use the neon colors right now. Maybe the neon colors won’t work for what you’re doing, unless you’re going for that whole neon-natural thing, which is different. It’s about trying to mix them and use them in an eloquent kind of way. I think I’ll never throw the baby out with the bath water. Those new sounds are in, I can’t help but not use them. One of my favorite songs is “Formation” by Beyonce. The breakbeat in that is one of the most awesome I’ve ever heard. And and all the production that Pharrell does—it’s hard to ignore that stuff. It’s really, really good. But it’s also hard to ignore the beauty of what happens between, you know, John Bonham and Jimmy Page. You can’t close down that shit; that’s just natural animals, fucking bringing it. So I definitely want to make sure that the Trio as an animal doesn’t get lost either. And I don’t think it has—it’s part of the journey.

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