Twenty years after his first album, he’s still striving to write the best songs he can extract from his creative mind. At 43, he’s more popular than ever, and just as focused on his music.

After six albums and world touring success that has made him one of Australia’s top independent music exports, he’s still searching to make the strongest connection he can with his audience.

His seventh album of new music, Home, dropped on Friday; 12 songs built loosely around drawing strength from a place you can call home, the people and moments that make you who you are.

It’s wrapped in a rich, luscious chemistry of John Butler rhythms – some simple, some complex – laced with big beats and deep, vibrating synthesizers. Lyrically, it is stripped down to rock’n’roll poetry, with driving lines of repetition, twists and turns, bathing listeners in an ocean of gripping melodies and dreamy visions.

It’s his best album yet.

The John Butler Trio celebrates the new album  embarking on an international tour of more than 60 shows that takes them to Japan, the UK, Ireland and into Europe and North America before arriving back in Australia. They will play the Sydney Opera House forecourt on Feb 14 and 15,. 

Thematically, the album concentrates on finding the meaning of “home” for Butler. He draws on a rich personal tapestry, producing some intensely personal observations, and lines so strong they will linger like unforgettable hits.

The title cut, Home, reflects on Butler’s time away as a touring musician, missing family, particularly his wife, Daniella. The pull of home, and the fear of disconnect, resonates, with lines like this:

The only way I see you is a picture in my wallet; there’s a number on my phone but I’m afraid to call it.

”I’ve been in a new place,” Butler says in a phone interview earlier in September from his property in Western Australia, the birds chirping in the background almost as if they were sitting on his shoulder. “Through the nature of emotional landscape, and also technical landscape, I’ve been able to produce this album very specifically to what I wanted to hear. The synth, the bass, the drum. I had the technology to play all the parts myself..

“ . . . it’s one of the reasons the album sounds different. I was really distilling it down and playing it again.”

Just Call leans towards the more classic feel of Butler, perhaps because it was in the works for a long time, before finally spilling out on this album. It’s a reflection on his journey to Broome as a young man, meeting his wife-to-be for the first time.

It beckons: You just stole my heart and cracked me open. Just call, you know I’ll be there. You know, this could be forever.

Besides a lyric video for Home, Just Call features as one of two videos released so far to support the album (the other is Wade in the Water). The videos, made by Nick McKinlay, are just as powerful as the music.

Wade in the Water is a continous shot of John Buter skateboarding down a rural suburban street, with his son Jahli joining on a board halfway through the video. Butler, now 43, has been skating for more than 33 years and he’s still got it, as anyone who follows him on social media knows.

The video to Just Call shows John and Jahli, again on skateboards in Pinjarra, Western Australia, Butler’s childhood stomping grounds.

But John departs the street, running down to the Murray River, takes off his shirt, dives in and proceeds to climb a magnificent tall tree up and up, and finally, jumps from the top branches straight into the river – all in a single shot.

The video footage is so powerful in both, you almost become separated from the songs. They pack a punch in stating the importance of “home” for Butler, where fun and family rule.

 But John departs the street, running down to the fast-flowing Murray River, taking off his shirt, diving in and proceeding to climb a magnificent tall tree up and up, and finally, jumping from the top branches straight into the river – all in a single shot.

The video footage is so powerful, so mesmerising, in both, you almost become separated from the songs. They pack a punch in stating the importance of “home” for Butler, where fun and family rule.

They also reenforce how music is such an integral part of Butler’s life.

“For me, it’s like a friend,” he said of music during an interview with me last year, while the album was still in the works. “A way of staying sane. It’s like a diary. My diary entries are in album form. I will be making music, and recording, just because I have to.

“I never wanted to do this. It wasn’t part of the big plan. It’s just something I had to do. In the same way I have to be around fire, or go for a good bush walk, or be by the river, I have to make music.

“It’s what I do. I eat, I sleep. Part of my ritual is music: pocket knives, songs, gardens, chook beds . . .”

Make no mistake, the songs in the new album do not proclaim life is all fun and games and Butler has all the answers. There is plenty of angst, plenty of indecision, love lost and regrets. 

Tell My Why, for instance, is the tale of love lost, looking for the reasons and yearning to pull it back together. It’s starts and finishes with an incredibly chilled vibe, while the meat in the middle feeds on dreamy anthemic  lines I can’t work it out, you can’t work it out, tell me what it’s all about darling.

On the album, it runs to 5.20, allowing for the long intro and exit sans words. Butler hints it will be tightened up a single for American radio play and I suggest it could be a major hit.

There are repeating themes of loss and disempowerment on the album, confusion in the modern world. While Butler’s own life is in a great space, he’s conscious of the world around him.

“As an artist, we are picking upon zeitgeist all the time. There is a definite zeitgeist of anxiety I am picking up on,” he says. “Ultra left, ultra right. Personal phones . . . not knowing the right thing to say.”

Australia’s not immune to any of it, he reminds: “We have our own dramas going on . . . we only voted in two of our last five prime ministers”.

He’s also politically active, as always, buying into the fight against the proposed Adani coalmine in Queensland in a big way. 

The most personal song on the album is Coffee, Methadone and Cigarettes, which delves into the death of his paternal grandfather, who he was named after, in a bushfire at Nannup in Western Australia in 1958, and the consequences for the entire family.

“I had to get that one out,” he says. “It’s extremely personal, so brutally personal. I’m very proud of the poetry and the storytelling in that song.”

Butler admits Home, his first album since Flesh and Blood in 2014, was a difficult birth. 

“It wasn’t coming out as easy as I wanted it to come out,” he says. “Because of how distilled the ideas are on my computer and in my mind . . . I found others so distracting.”

So he packed up and took his ideas and sounds to Melbourne to work with producer Jan Skubiszewski, who also made Flesh and Blood with him.

“There were so many things that felt odd,”  he says. “Leaving the trio, leaving my studio. Jan created an amazing space. He had the technology proficiencies I needed. Opinions I could rely on. All the stuff in my demos, he helped me emulate . . .

“It was insular, alchemic, and that’s why it sounds so personal.”

Several songs on the album have long intros and jams built in, with repeating chorus lines, allowing a listener to tune in and ride along. It’s clearly done with intention, and Butler feels he’s become a better songwriter.

Combining lyrics and music is a very individual process for Butler, a matter of, as he says, “refine and refine, until they say what they need to say, and then I will stay out of the way”.

“It’s been running through my head, about a new band, why does everybody like their first album,” he says of songwriting. “It’s because writers didn’t care what people thought . . . Then they go on, and try to impress Leonard Cohen, and be clever.

“Somewhere along the line, if we are not careful, we can get in the way of an inner genius.”

There’s no place like Home.

Read more

John Butler releases April Uprising in 2010.

John Butler releases Flesh and Blood in 2014.

John Butler review, Civic Theatre, February 2016

John Butler review, The Basement, November 2013