Glenn is solid, but definitely not a starting point. It's more of his version of the Billy Joel / Elton piano singer-songwriter thang
Ah, thanks, I had managed to track these down since I posted this, but now I can compare for better quality. If you’ve got other old Butch stuff I’m always looking for more
Hey everyone I had someone randomly kindly reach out with a super high quality early gen rip of the Marvelous 3 Hey! Album demo tape. This is an absolute treasure to have surface. If you’ve ever listened to the circulating versions of So Much To Ask and Betty Says and wished they didn’t sound like they were recorded in a tin can, this is your day. They’re here along with 6 other tracks that I believe are the same or at least close to the Indie versions in incredible fidelity. (I haven’t had a chance to compare if they are exactly the same recordings yet) This kind of thing doesn’t surface very often, so huge thanks goes out for bringing this to us all. I hope everyone enjoys this piece of Butch history https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... drive_link
Well just over a month later and another surprise has surfaced, someone of Facebook posted an old taped interview of the Marvelous 3 on 96 Rock in 1997. While on the show they played a couple demos they'd been working on. Most are already available in high quality on the Indie release of Hey! Album, but the hidden treasure is a studio version of On The Floor, a track which has circulated in live form, but up to this point I'd never heard of a studio version even having been recorded. The quality isn't perfect due to the source, but it's not everyday a Marvelous 3 song from 25 years ago suddenly makes itself known 00 On the Floor.mp3
That rules. Now, I really really want to find the live version of Butch playing "Screwed" I had when I was a teenager.
Butch Walker Says He's Done Making Solo Albums, Reflects on 'Letters' “AFTER RELEASING 10 studio albums that run the gamut from rock-opera concept records to collections of cocksure power-pop, Butch Walker is putting a period on his recording career as a solo artist.” “I don’t want to be that cliché of an aging artist that puts out new shit that nobody cares about,” Walker tells Rolling Stone. “And when you write so many records doing a certain thing, you start to worry about recycling and repeating yourself. I would rather celebrate a record that has an anniversary — and I have a lot of them. By the time I get through that cycle, I’m going to be like 900 years old.” It’s April 1st, right?…. Right?
So, if Walker is serious about calling his solo career quits, would that make 2022’s Butch Walker as…Glenn, his excellent piano-man LP in the vein of Elton John and Billy Joel, his final album? “Glenn was the swan song,” he confirms. “And I thought that when I did it. I just really needed to process it over a year or two and see if my theory held up.”
Respectfully to Marvelous 3 and to IV, an album I liked, that record was distinctly less good than almost anything he made solo.
It bums me out so much that we've so thoroughly discounted excellent late-career work from aging artists that a 54-year-old is already throwing in the towel because he assumes "no one cares." I can't really blame him: the entire industry, from the labels to the marketing machine to music criticism, fetishizes youth and the "new thing" and gets bored with artists that have longevity. If not outright hostile. But this is definitely a depressing outcome. I thought Glenn was a really interesting pivot toward more of a classic singer/songwriter approach and was looking forward to seeing what he'd do with that path going forward. Guess we're not getting that.