After breaking through with her song ‘You Don’t Have to Die (to Be Dead to Me)’ Kaitlin Butts refused to let that viral success be the limit of her career. She signed to a major record label, toured relentlessly, both as a headline act but mainly as an opener for bigger names like Lainey Wilson and Ella Langley, and offered us an almost constant stream of funny, engaging and inventive social media posts. The effort Kaitlin was putting in to becoming a star was admirable, even if it looked more than a little exhausting.
Truth is that the real difference between viral success and a lasting career in the music industry all comes down to the songs themselves. You can say what you want about Ella & Lainey’s ‘glow-ups’ or their curated social media – none of that would matter if they didn’t have the quality songs and albums that transcend the algorithm. Kaitlin’s last album ‘Roadrunner’ was stacked with songs that could have been hits, which is why she broke through. It was a concept album filled with energy and dramatic gusto, which means this follow up ‘Hello, Honky Tonk’ was always going to have a lot to live up to.
After the epic ‘Oklahoma!’ inspired ‘Roadrunner’, this album centres the songs around the theme of honky tonks, those dive bars filled with drinking, cheating and classic country music. We begin with a spoken word introduction by Lainey Wilson over a classic sounding western soundtrack, telling us about the ‘beer-drinking, boot-stomping’ venue we are about to visit, owned by a woman with big dreams of stardom. Kaitlin is our girl seeking the spotlight.
There’s a sense of theatrical drama, vaudeville even, in the kick off tune ‘I Want to Be Bad’ that tells you everything about the direction this album is going to take. Kaitlin is going BIG. She sings this one with the OTT energy of a girl on a Friday night after a long, hard week (hey we’ve all been there). The fun of that one leads us into ‘The Bartender’ about the truth of these places – the honky tonk is a place where you can let loose and lose yourself. Just tip ‘The Bartender’ and he’ll keep your secrets. Both of these songs are infectious fun.
We move then into another epic vocal performance with ‘Never Really Mine’, written with Maggie Antone and Lola Kirke, which feels inspired by Jolene, Choosin Texas and Brandy Clark’s ‘Hold My Hand’ but reclaiming the narrative with a feminist twist. In a fleeting moment she sees her partner checking out a girl and that’s enough for her to realise the truth about her relationship. ‘Go on and get her / Yeah, I’ll be just fine/ If she can take you that easy / You were never really mine’ she sings, freeing herself from his toxic grasp.
From there she finds the confidence to embrace her own power with the rip roaring ‘I Make Cowboys Cry’ which has a brilliant fiddle breakdown and just generally is a barnstorming moment of joy, which will no doubt be brilliant live with her amazing band.
On ‘The Joker’ Kaitlin takes the pace down a notch but she doesn’t hold back on her truth telling. She goes for the jugular about selfish men who don’t give a shit and yet still succeed. The best song on the album by a mile.
There’s a tongue in cheek criticism of the trendiness of the country genre in ‘Everybody Wanna Sing a Country Song’ with some self-deprecating references to her own background in there too, which makes this one of the funniest songs on the album.
We then have a big piano ballad, ‘What More Could You Want?’ like she’s stepped into the spotlight of the musical of her life. Here’s the moment where she acknowledges the grind, her never ending quest for success, asking the audience: Is it ever enough? Tell me I am too much?Do I need more sequins? Her ability to look herself in the mirror and share that desperation to be a star, might sound tragic but it has more of a self-aware, self-mocking quality to it which makes the song a brilliant move.
Note then that she follows that epic, theatrical, staged moment with a beautifully understated love song, ‘Still Got It’ where she finds confidence and strength in the arms of a man ‘who feels like home’. This feels more intimate and drawn from real life, offering us a look behind the curtain.
After that little interlude we’re back to the main stage drama with ‘Crazy I Can Be’ which certainly feels a little ridiculous in comparison with the truth telling of what came in the two songs before. Yet there’s enough of the Miranda Lambert in this one to make it work. She leans even further into the silly with ‘Bacon Naked (Take it From Me)’ which feels like a very Kacey influenced moment of humour. Better is ‘Hell, I Don’t Know’ which discusses divorce and drugs, the reality of having to embrace the darkness in life in order to see the stars.
The album finishes with ‘Midnight, I’ll Always Be Yours’ a good night to all the characters and honky tonks she’s visited. The night is over and she retires to her hotel room to contemplate the life of a showgirl. She ‘wakes up alone’ with a song in her head and smoke in her hair, sounding like she’s had the best time of her life. When the album finishes you just know she’ll be back again tomorrow night, ordering another drink and sinking into the bar stool. Dreamers never give up.
So is ‘Hello, Honky Tonk’ the album that will push Kaitlin Butts into the musical stratosphere? Is being too much enough? I really hope so because she deserves it so much. What I admire most about Kaitlin is her commitment to the bit, her undeniable star quality that surely no little honky tonk can contain. She’s given us her all and then some, and for that she should take a bow.
Leave a Reply