Rayland Baxter
If I Were A Butterfly
ATO Records
Buy via Official Store & Bandcamp | Listen Below
A few years ago, I found myself at a Rayland Baxter show on a lark. His first record, 2012’s unassuming Feathers & Fishhooks, was served up to me algorithmically and I found the rest of his work pleasant enough. The show I found that night was a side of Baxter I had no idea existed—adventurous, chaotic, and emotionally devastating.
He played “Come Back To Earth,” a tortured Mac Miller cover (that would eventually feature on Good Mmornin, his tribute album to the late rapper. In a solo acoustic set, he played an homage to a friend who had just died in a drunk driving accident and transitioned magically into one of his most innocent and wistful tunes out of it. I literally gasped. Every decision that night was in the interests of elevating the material and bringing band and audience into uncharted waters. Rayland Baxter was not the harmless act I thought he was. After that show, I found myself listening to his studio output less frequently, feeling that none of it could capture the extremes of that special night.
Enter If I Were A Butterfly, an album that captures that ethos in every respect. The arrangement, production, and especially performances of this fourth LP of original material capture the energy of that night at an even higher level. The difference-maker between the live show and this album is the songwriting; while Baxter had always been a charming lyricist, and he sometimes achieved serious pathos on songs like “Let It All Go, Man,” he never had the buffet of complications and contradictions that this most recent batch of songs offers.
The album’s centerpiece is “Tadpole,” an open-hearted inquiry into childhood, faith, violence, and home. Baxter sounds like someone completely unmoored, struggling to make sense of himself as a participant in a scary and unjust world. He taps into the natural naïveté of his voice to rip at the heartstrings, but it sounds completely earned because the feelings, and questions, of the song feel so genuine. When you slap a song like this in the middle of your album, everything is going to revolve around it.
Which makes the opening suite of four high energy, almost thrashing rockers feel all the more exhilarating. His time exploring moody, slinky grooves via Mac Miller pays off on opener “If I Were A Butterfly.” It’s a meandering, six-minute track that builds slowly over the course of its runtime, offering dynamic peaks and valleys that mirror Baxter’s lyrical soul searching. It seems much less interested in cohesion than Baxter’s early work, opting for a twisting barrage of background guitars, horns, and vocals as the track tumbles through its final minutes.
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Its follow-up, “Billy Goat,” is a stormy breakup tune that sounds as confused as Baxter feels. Raw, propulsive, and catchy, it makes expansive use of studio tricks to alter vocals and move instruments forward and backward in the mix. In a musical age where production expertise is the norm, production surprise feels harder to come by. But the twists and turns of “Billy Goat,” which are all in service of the song, are thrilling and unexpected.
The rest of the pre-“Tadpole” cuts, “Rubberband Man” and “Buckwheat,” are similarly kooky. The former is an off-beat, psychedelic romp while the latter is the biggest puzzle on the whole record—I have absolutely no idea what it’s about, but I find it strangely captivating. Featuring a lurching, minimal instrumentation behind Baxter’s distorted vocals, “Buckwheat” sounds like an intentionally misplaced attempt at bravado that’s about to be undercut by the vulnerability of “Tadpole.”
The back half of the record is more melodic, seemingly more normal, and generally groovier. Both “Dirty Streets” and “Grafitti Street” find Baxter closer to his more fun Wide Awake (2018) sound. “Thunder Sound,” though, is one last brooding, paranoid rip through Baxter’s psyche before giving way to an elegiac coda that yields to the record’s finale.
Throughout the record, there’s a tension between Baxter’s soul-searching, his fear of adulthood, his deep sense of love and hope, and his romantic yearning. The final song, “My Argentina,” billed as an homage to an unrequited love, comes to be about everything else from If I Were A Butterfly. While we start out with the familiar innocence of Baxter’s voice, it collapses near the song’s end, as he wails out a chorus. It’s desperate and wrenching, a moment when you realize that so much of the confusion of the rest of the record can happen all at once in one moment of intense feeling. The song ends with one more verse in Baxter’s regular voice, as if he’s expected to go back to normal, but there’s a sinister overtone that threatens that all will not be fine.
This is not to confuse seriousness with depth, or even lightness with shallowness. The thrill of this record is Baxter’s tacit acknowledgement that he had mastered one sound and dug deeply into himself to find another. The skill and artistic tendency that astonished me all those years ago now have a record to call their own, and it’s more than I ever could have asked for: a work that is as expressive and adventurous as it is cohesive and vulnerable.
Notable Tracks: “Billy Goat” | “If I Were A Butterfly” | “My Argentina” | “Tadpole”
BUYIf I Were A Butterfly via Rayland Baxter’s Official Store | Bandcamp
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