Four years ago John Butler was recording his eighth studio album when something out of character happened: he gave up.
“My anxiety peaked out,” the roots rock musician says. “It’s something I worked on for three years and I couldn’t fix or finish it. I was like, ‘I don’t know how to do this?’ I felt out of my depth. I lost my confidence and I walked away.”
Butler was buckling under the strain of multiple life stressors. His father and father-in-law died from long-term illnesses within 40 hours of each other. He was getting his daughter, Banjo, through year 12 amid Covid shutdowns and reeling from burnout after touring his 2018 album, Home, and disbanding the John Butler Trio.
He recounts his “existential breakdown” as we meet for a coffee and a stroll in the west end of Fremantle, Western Australia. It’s a warm, cloudless autumn morning and, despite the tumult of the past few years – or perhaps because of it – the 49-year-old is calm and grounded. He oscillates between laid-back Aussie-California charm, moments of intense introspection, and philosophising about the state of the world (“These ecocidal maniacs are trashing the joint,” he says; more on that later).
Butler has had another crack at his eighth studio album; this time with an entirely different approach. Released on Friday, Running River is a meditative, ambient record that strips back his musicianship to bare essentials. Surrender, an album teaser released a few weeks ago, offers almost 10 minutes of slow, rhythmic guitar – something you might listen to in savasana, post-yoga class.
Running River is the first instalment of Butler’s new musical project The Four Seasons – four albums he describes as “a conceptual scaffolding” to help him recover creatively. The second album, Still Searching, due for release in late October, is an instrumental body of work recalling his formative years busking in Fremantle. The third will be a song-driven studio recording and, for the fourth, Butler will return to working with a band. Those LPs will be released in 2025 and 2027 respectively.
“This idea kind of landed in my lap that I needed to heal, I needed to go back to where I started,” says Butler, who also sees the series as an invitation for collective healing. “If I’m not too bold to say, I think global society, at least in the west, is a bit shattered in the nervous system.”
Clutching our coffees, we round the bend from Pakenham Street on to High Street, its row of Victorian-era buildings gleaming in the mid-morning light. Fremantle’s west end offers a roving history of Butler’s early career. First he takes me to a grey and white terrace where he lived in his 20s and recorded his first three albums. Later we stroll past the old headquarters of a group of environmental activists whom Butler befriended and, finally, we head up to the Round House, a historic prison overlooking the Indian Ocean where he would often play his guitar.
While it’s not on our walking itinerary, the most important landmark in Butler’s early career might be Fremantle Markets, where he started busking in the late 90s as a dreadlocked 20-year-old. He distributed his first recording from the streets: a cassette of instrumentals titled Searching for Heritage, which sold 3,000 copies.
In 1998 he met Jason McGann and Gavin Shoesmith, who joined him to form John Butler Trio – what followed was an extraordinary trajectory from busking to multi-platinum success. Their third album, Sunrise Over Sea, was the first by an independent artist to hit No 1 on the Aria charts.
We take a seat on the boardwalk at Bathers beach and Butler tells me about his decade touring the US – often with his kids and wife, Danielle Caruana, in tow, using cloth nappies and living on a tour bus. “We’re still recovering,” he says, laughing.
The band went from huge sold-out gigs across Australia to playing at dingy bars to five or six people in the States, but they stuck at it, eventually cracking one of the world’s toughest markets. Butler beams when he recounts gigs at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, which has hosted the likes of Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young and the Grateful Dead. He has played multiple sold-out headline shows there over the years.
It’s this work ethic that gave Butler his success – but it’s taken a toll. “For 25 years of my life, every night, I ripped my heart out on stage,” he says. “I love doing it, it’s great, but there’s a fair bit of fight or flight going on in my nervous system. And now I’m paying the piper, as they say.”
Butler is sometimes branded a “million-dollar hippy” but the artist’s commitment to social activism came long before the fame and the accolades.
In 1997 he met the group of activists fighting to save the forests of Western Australia’s south-west. “It was like a lightning bolt,” he says. “I got completely enamoured with that culture and decided that if I was to do this self-indulgent act of making art, then let me be a conduit.”
Butler has sung about the climate crisis (The Sea Is Rising) and refugees (Home Is Where the Heart Is) and staged protest gigs. The 2013 Concert for the Kimberley brought together 30,000 people to stand up against the region’s industrialisation.
“It’s an ongoing fight,” he says. “We’re still stopping that country from being fracked and they still want to build gas plants and mine for oil. These ecocidal maniacs are trashing the joint.”
Almost an hour into our chat, when time is running short, I land on a topic that really gets Butler fired up: fake news and the erosion of democracy.
“So much of the mainstream media has been bought out by billionaires who have an agenda,” he says. “Our government’s been corporately white-anted too. And these corporate interests erode confidence in some of our greatest institutions.
“We don’t want to live in a lawless, post-truth society. Mad Max is not something to aspire to.”
We stroll back towards the Round House, passing the spot on the limestone ridge where almost 30 years ago Butler strummed his guitar to no one but the setting sun.
After we say our goodbyes, I wander back down High Street, passing Butler’s old haunts.
Something he said earlier comes back to me: “In your early 20s you start off pretty righteous, and somewhere in your mid 40s, when life has shown you a few seasons, you can either Trump your way through it and think the sun still shines out of your arse, or you can become a bit humbled.
“The higher I climb on this mountain, the more I’m humbled by relationships and what it means to be a listener, a father, a husband and a friend.”
John Butler’s album Running River is out now
