Every artist has their heroes.  And I have plenty.  Eddie Izzard, Prince, Robin Williams, Aerosmith… Artists that regularly come and go in my playlists. Sometimes I don’t hear them for awhile. Then they’re back again like old friends.

But that man you see at the left almost never leaves my ears.  His name is Butch Walker.  Butch’s “day job”, as he calls it, is writing songs and producing for other artists like Pink, Christina Aguilera, and Fall Out Boy.

But the material he writes for himself is the work of a world class craftsmen of rock n’ roll. It’s thick and sad and snarky and funny. It belies a deep deep knowledge of pop music history and drags classic sounds kicking and screaming into our modern ears.

I thought I’d give you a small selection of some of my favorite Butch Walker videos to give you some insight into the kind of stuff my own songs are influenced by. And I encourage you to go deeper and find out more about him. His autobiography Drinking With Strangers is fantastic.

And at the bottom, you’ll find a video of something that doesn’t happen very often… Me doing someone else’s song. 🙂

Mixtape from the album Letters

Bethamphetamine (Pretty Pretty) from the album
Rise & Fall of Butch Walker & The Let’s-Go-Out-Tonites

Synthesizers from the album Spade

Summer of ’89 from Spade

Ladies and Gentlemen… The Let’s Go Out Tonites!

This album is my favorite Butch record. I’ve gone in depth into it in a previous post.  And this song is my favorite song on that record.  There was no official video available, but this live version is great. One day this song came on in the car and I told my girlfriend it was my favorite one on the album. She said, “Of course it is. It sounds like something you’d write.” Either a fantastic compliment that the quality of my songwriting is improved or a charge of narcissism that I only like things that sound like I wrote them. 😉

All The Love You Need from the documentary Butch Walker: Out of Focus

(…and performed by me…..)