Jay Houhlias
At every live music bar, talent show or open mic night, there is someone attempting John Butler’s Ocean. Running for a loose ten minutes long, set in open C tuning, rich with harmonics, arpeggios, magic, and who knows what else, the song is infamously complicated to play and infamously impossible to replicate. It featured on his first instrumental album Searching for Heritage, and here we are years later, catching up with John as he returns to instrumentals once again with his new album Still Searching.
His main guitar, the well-est loved thing you ever saw, the eleven string Maton, features on the cover. He laughs when I ask if the wear was all his doing, “It was all well-earned, it wasn’t like a pre-distressed pair of jeans… It was the second guitar I bought for myself… once I made enough money busking by the age of twenty.”
“It took me from busking to headlining Red Rocks… I’ve been playing that guitar a long time. I keep retiring her, but she keeps on coming back, wanting to tell stories… yeah, a beautiful old friend of mine.”
“Instruments and people kind of fuse… they entangle. When that guitar was first made, it didn’t have a whole lot of personality. And when I started to busk and play a lot of instrumentals, where I cut my teeth, I didn’t necessarily have a fully-fledged personality myself, so we both influenced each other, both gained our scars in battle, our wounds, our idiosyncratic natures, our styles are sounds.”
I’ve always been fascinated by the nature of instrument playing. The physical act, like lifting a weight, needs to be married with not only technique, but feeling. Its graciousness and delicacy is only attuned for and facilitated by the player’s hands to do the logistical labour. Brute force and physical prowess will not make music, but neither will ideas without physical follow through.
“I find when I’m practising, I’m creating rigour. I had a great guitar teacher I worked with a few years ago named Debashish Bhattacharya – actually not a guitar teacher, he’s more a slide master – I got to work with him. He had this great attitude – through discipline comes freedom.”
“He would teach me simple techniques – here John made noises, dah de de dah dah de dah – which you do with your fingers, and I practiced that with a scale for eight hours. It was rigorous and it was boring and hard at the start… but after hours and hours I found I could do this technique, and when I was working with a melody, I found I had this whole dexterity and freedom I hadn’t enjoyed before.”
John is well accustomed to musical work from his busking days. He explains how he not only enjoys this work, but how it’s a compulsion and part of his wiring.
“I played for eight hours a day busking… I played nonstop, I was obsessed and completely OCD, and addicted, I loved it. And nothing much has changed. I just have less time!… I still make time for all that kind of OCD internal work, I just stay up later and play and play, trying to discover and keep that sense of wonder.”
“This comes with a complete dopamine hit. When I get a plucking pattern right and I can add it into my voice, into my array of paints… when I get a new colour, and it’s fun, I get a hit, a total hit, and that’s addictive.”
“Style is made by limitation. If I had the limitless talent to play like all my influences, like Debashish or Hendrix, I wouldn’t sound like me, I’d sound like them, because I love them. If I was good enough to play like them, I probably just would, out of obsession.”
All image credits Nick Mckinlay
At first I thought John was just being humble when explaining limitations, but soon after I realised it was more about understanding the kind of art you’re serving when creating music.
“Whatever the song wants, I will try to give, within my limitations, which then will form a style. I just try to stay there and try not think about it too much more than that… When I’m writing music I’m trying to explore something, and sometimes words have limitations, and that’s when the instrumentals come out.”
“Still, when recording instrumental music, I try and think about verses and choruses. Just because it’s instrumental music it doesn’t mean it has to be virtuoso the entire time, you know, it could just be simple, a simple line, like in songwriting, sometimes it’s just the simplest lines.”
The new album is both tribal and visceral, a constant rhythm, something John has always been drawn to.
“The tribal thing is my love of beats. I like very hypotonic and simple things with a simple groove… I think that’s what I’ve always loved about Celtic and Indian music… there are these sessions you can become part of and witness, and they are really cultural. They are deeper than a pop song. It’s like, ‘We’ve been doing this thing for a long time… this repetitive trance, this riff, in a melodic circle for thousands of years’… As a young person watching the ANZAC parade, once the bagpipes and marching band came out, I was like – ‘this is a SICK sound! Sounds badass’.”
John and I then discussed the lyrical content of his music. Much of his earlier work was about social issues and making a stand, and now his music centres around more personal stories – as he puts it, ‘finding worldly stories in individual stories.’
“What I saw around me was taking up a lot of my attention, and it still does… I find there is only so many protest songs you can write about bad guys doing bad things, and if we all stand up we can unite, and get ‘them’.
“Although I’m for that and interested in that… I do believe in people power, I also know that without having a revolution within yourself… If you can’t stop fighting the war within, and quit saying the meanest things you could ever say to anybody, to yourself, how could you possibly help bring that to the world?”
“…but you know, write me a good song and tell me a good story… Of course I know what’s going on in the world, I know we need to change and not have our asses handed to us by corporations, I know that, but tell me a good story about it.”
Regarding a good song and story, I finished by asking John about one of his best. If you’re attempting Ocean, he had a few words of help.
“Well, I would say, um, make sure you, ah… stretch,” he jokes, but at the same time it’s actual practical advice.
“If I take that song for granted in any way of what it’s going to ask of me… still to this day I have to try one hundred percent to play that song.”
“Be as mindful and present to the song as possible… so you can find yourself in it… and then if you’re really present with it, you’ll start writing you own things… The song is kind of not mine in a way. Anybody I’ve ever seen play Ocean ends up writing their own little section. The song asks them too… the song is like, ‘Hey, you see me, you know my shape, now, we can dance’.”
Dance on with John with the release of Still Searching on November 1. This will be followed by a national capital city tour of intimate venues. For more info, head to www.johnbutlertrio.com.
