“A lot of people are using what they consider to be their freedom to hurt others,” says Butch Walker, who tackles the jagged, dangerous divide in the U.S. on his new album ‘American Love Story’
Walker did. Growing up in Cartersville, Georgia, he heard the inappropriate jokes and bigoted observations. They were commonplace where he lived, just part of a normal life that, in hindsight, seems anything but.
soon after the deadly 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, white-supremacist rally. When the record was finished, he sat on it for two years, uncertain if it should be released. He focused instead on his successful job as a producer, overseeing hit albums by Fall Out Boy, Rob Thomas, Weezer, the Struts, and Green Day’s latest,
Walker sings each song in the first person, inhabiting characters that may make other artists, not to mention listeners, uncomfortable. There’s the narrator of “6FT Middle-Age American Man,” whose pickup truck is full of bricks meant for the border wall, “to keep out all the spics and the gays.” In “Torn in the USA,” he’s an anonymous white guy wondering, “How am I gonna know who to hate?” when the prejudiced pals he used to commiserate with now all have children who listen to Drake.
“‘Flyover state’ is a derogatory term, and I grew up in what would be considered a flyover state. So this is not a song making fun of those,” he says. “The guy who’s narrating is talking about why he’s pissed about people slogging him off, and the fact that he’s been fucked over by what he considers to be a terrible government and a terrible class system. But more importantly, he’s just emotionally bent. And have I been that person? Yes. Do I see people like that every day? Yes.
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