Friday, August 2 • 8:00pm • The Bowl
Rayland Baxter (Nashville, TN)
For the making of his fourth album, If I Were a Butterfly, Rayland Baxter holed up for over a year at a former rubber band factory turned studio in the Kentucky countryside. “I spent that year living in a barn with the squirrels and the birds, and I discovered so much about music and how to create it,” says the Tennessee-bred singer/songwriter. “Instead of going into a studio with a producer for two weeks, I just waited for the record to build itself. I’d get up and go outside, see a butterfly and connect that with some impulsive thought I’d had three months ago, and suddenly a song I’d been working on would make sense. That’s how the whole album came to be.” The follow-up to 2018’s critically acclaimed Wide Awake, If I Were a Butterfly finds Baxter slowly piecing together the album’s patchwork of lush psychedelia and Beatlesesque pop. In addition, Baxter recorded with a remarkable lineup of musicians, including Shakey Graves, Lennon Stella, several members of Cage the Elephant, and Zac Cockrell of Alabama Shakes. In an especially meaningful turn, two of the album’s tracks feature the elegant pedal steel work of his father, Bucky Baxter (a musician who performed with Bob Dylan and who passed away in May 2020). Thanks to the extraordinary care and ingenuity behind its creation, If I Were a Butterfly arrives as a work of rarefied magic, capable of stirring up immense feeling while leaving the listener happily wonderstruck. For Baxter, the act of self-producing such a sonically and emotionally expansive body of work proved both exhilarating and arduous. “It really wore me out to spend all that time alone at the studio, editing the hell out of this record; my heart definitely suffered,” he says. “But I also had the guidance of my dad, who was in my dreams all the time—if I was moving too fast, I’d hear him telling me to slow down.” Even in its most somber moments, If I Were a Butterfly wholly fulfills Baxter’s mission of imparting a certain purposeful joy. “I hope that this album makes people feel the way I do whenever I listen to my favorite records, and that it gives them a platform to dream on.”
www.raylandbaxter.com