Features

John Butler: The Search

Drawn from the pages of July’s Relix, here is our feature on the John Butler Trio. In addition, if you haven’t seen it, click here to check out John Butler’s recent solo acoustic performance at the Relix office.

THE SEARCH

In a clearing in the thick bush of Western Australia, John Butler sits alone picking his guitar, playing to the most influential audience he has ever had: the spirit of his long departed grandfather, John Francis Butler, who died at the very spot Butler is playing while valiantly fighting a forest fire in 1958.

In a hotel room in snowy Sofia, Bulgaria, the young Butler looks through the snowflakes at the war memorial that sits on an island in a traffic rotary. The statue is a magnificent testament to the will of the Bulgarian people, but to John Butler, it is personal as his great, great grandfather and his extended family made up part of the original freedom fighters that fired the first salvo of the “April Uprising” against the Ottoman Empire in 1876.

Close to his hometown of Fremantle, Australia, Butler goes on a walkabout through the shanty town where his great grandmother once sang for the pennies that were thrown at her in order to provide for the family of eight that she was raising alone. He discovers that, as a teenager, he was a busker on the same dusty streets.

All of these experiences helped Butler answer a rather philosophical but basic question: If you don’t know where you’ve been, how will you get to where you are going? His genealogical journeys were part of an episode of the television show Who Do You Think You Are? that traces a celebrity’s family tree to reveal their own lineage (the episode aired in November, 2009). Butler, as introspective as musicians come, was profoundly affected by the experience to the degree that it changed his internal compass. He finally stopped his meandering and pulled his career path into focus.