John Butler: Healthy Anxiety & 'Deep Existential Shit'

When John Butler was working on his seventh John Butler Trio album Home, he was hoping to marry electronic production with acoustic fingerpicking. “I wanted to create this unique sound that I’d heard in my head, and been wanting to bring out into the world for a long time,” he says. For much of that time, that meant working by himself, away from his band and regular collaborators. All that time alone meant more time to ponder the nature of artmaking, and of the self. Butler was, he says, going through some “deep existential shit”, which holds up in conversation.

“Anybody who lives a public life, and tries to keep it real, is going to have some kind of existential landscape to traverse, where what people know you as, which is your name, and who you actually are can be two completely different things,” offers Butler, 43, on a sunny spring morning in Margaret River. “You end up having a bit of a Jim Carrey moment: like, 'Who am I?' You end up going deep down that rabbit hole. It’s a worthy rabbit hole, but it’s fraught with psychosis.”

“Who am I?” Butler continues, “that’s not something I can answer for you. But it’s a worthy question to ask yourself. Especially when it raises real challenges in staying human, staying real, staying what you define as authentic, or congruent with your life and your morals and who you really are. Somebody can see me, see my physical body in front of them, and not really see me. They see their own projection of who they think I might be.”

And project onto Butler people do: he is forever, in the minds of many, the dreadlocked, didge-blowing, “million-dollar” hippy; the ultra-successful patron-saint of Byron Bay’s barefoot buskers. It’s a reductive caricature, especially for someone whose relationship to music is so sincere as to be spiritual. “For me, music is always a part of the alchemist’s journey,” Butler says. “It’s always, first, a journal entry, expressing something in my life in this very intimate way. It’s always going to be a vehicle for healing, within and without.”

“Music,” he continues, “brings the best out of me, and helps me to confront the worst of me. I’m thankful for that. I’m really thankful for that.” Through the years, Butler has had countless listeners tell him that his albums have served as salvation for them, gotten them through hard times. It’s something he embraces, but only up to a point. “I want to be there for people like music was there for me,” he says. “But it’s a fine line. You don’t want to turn into some soapbox, self-help guru. That’s dangerous, it’s an uncreative, uninspiring, condescending world to go into as a musician.”

The only self-help at play on Home is Butler attempting to help himself; making an album, for the songwriter, always a form of therapy. “Or,” he laughs, “like therapy mixed with dental work. It can be painful! That sounds like I don’t like it at all. But, it’s more like, in trying to bring the best out of you, you suffer, you dig deep. The music is always drawing me out beyond my limits, beyond myself, and that’s going to create anxiety, for sure. But, I think it’s a healthy kind of anxiety. It’s like when you exercise, you strain; when a trainer pushes you farther than you feel comfortable, or you go swimming in the freezing river. It’s painful, it’s uncomfortable, but afterwards you feel real good.”

Continuing the employment of metaphor, Butler offers that releasing an album “is like riding a rollercoaster: it’s scary, but it won’t kill you”. In the lead-up to Home’s release, he’s feeling nervous and anxious. “It’s such a vulnerable thing to bare your bones to the world, voluntarily,” Butler says. “Especially now. It feels more vulnerable than ever. [Your] first [album], you don’t even think about it. You’re more like, ‘I hope someone listens to this, that’d be great!’ But once you know you do have an audience, you’d be lying if said you didn’t care if people liked it. It’s a very bold move to display your inner workings to the world.”