After many failures, false starts, trials, tribulations, experiments, lessons, and deaths (both metaphorical and physical), John Butler will release his 10th album PRISM, on 5 September.
When he first started experimenting with these songs, back during the pandemic, Butler had no idea of the arduous and enlightening journey they would take him on.
Speaking on a break after soundcheck from Edmonton, Canada, he says it was a mixture of things that set him on this path. His band had just disbanded; the lockdowns had begun; he felt a need for some personal space. Always a believer in independent music, he got the idea for a project completely his own – written, recorded and engineered all by himself.
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“I mean, I’ve always produced my albums and arranged them, but engineering is a whole other thing,” he says. He’d been making decent headway, when suddenly he felt a shift.
“It’s a deep labyrinth. I had about 20 or 30 songs, and hundreds and hundreds of tracks, and then everything stopped working. I got in over my head. The really weird thing was once it stopped working, I was like, ‘Oh’, and then it just started falling apart and my anxiety went through the roof.”
Although he’d already written around 40 per cent of the songs that would eventually make it onto PRISM, Butler couldn’t finish them. It felt like a failure.
“I couldn’t do anything. I was just like, ‘Oh my god’. So I failed and I surrendered, and that was a huge moment. Once that was settled, then I had space,” he tells me.
“And then all of a sudden, in that space that is surrender, I had a bit of an epiphany.”
A framework came to him, a cycle through which he saw his life and his work: four seasons. In the first season, he had to heal. “I just lost my father and my partner lost her father within 40 hours of each other,” he tells me. “Our dads died. Our marriage kind of died. My band died. I had an ego death. It was like a lot of dying, you know?”
Through the healing process came Running River, an ambient album Butler had been meaning to make for 20 years. The second season, as he saw it, was to begin again, so Butler returned to his roots of busking on an 11-string guitar and released an instrumental album called Still Searching in 2024.
Then it was time for the third season – going solo – which meant once again facing the complex project that was PRISM.
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“Sometimes the art knows more than I do. The art was like, ‘You’re not ready for me. You’re not ready. You can’t do this. You need to go back over there.’ And in doing that, I achieved some old goals that I really wanted to achieve and recalibrated my instrument and myself,” he says.
Once again tackling PRISM, Butler decided to enlist the help of James Ireland of Pond. But even with Ireland’s assistance, it wasn’t always smooth sailing.
“I was sitting on my back porch listening to what we’d been doing one night I was just like, ‘ahh’. I got the cold shivers. I was just like, ‘This isn’t right. Oh no, this isn’t it. I was closer when I was doing it by myself then I am now, even though it sounds better, it’s more tight.’
“That broke my heart. I was like, “Oh my God, I’m done. I’m fucking done with this album. Maybe I’m just done in general. Maybe I’m done with this music thing.”
But he wasn’t done with PRISM – or PRISM wasn’t done with him. They tore the album apart and rebuilt it once again, finally finding their groove. The result is 12 songs that span the emotional spectrum – exuberant, touching, and most importantly true. With the album and the first season behind him, Butler offers a metaphor.
“I see songs and I hear them, and they’re like wild horses in the bush,” he tells me. “Artists go bush walking all the time and we see songs, we see horses, and we want to bring them in to show everybody in the city.
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“But you can bring a horse in and break its spirit, and what was wild and beautiful out there can be backbroken and depressed by the time you get onto an album, or into the city. And so every horse wants its saddle put on a different way if it’s gonna come in.
“I just keep on learning that more and more as I make albums. And this album was very stubborn. It was like a Mustang just going, ‘No,’” he says. “I was like, ‘Fucking hell, I’m trying to make you, what do you want?’”
As for the fourth season, Butler’s got no idea yet what that will bring. But as he moves into the future, it’s clear the lessons he learned while making PRISM will stay with him.
“You know, I realised one thing in my career,” says Butler. “I work for the music. I always thought the music should make me happy, but actually, I have to make the music happy. I work for the song and I am the butler to that music. I will give it anything it wants.”
John Butler is playing at the Northcote Theatre on 11 September. Get tickets here.
