(Feb. 13, 2007) PCM's Kelsey talked to Reuben Butchart about his new album, "Golden Boy," as well as his childhood and musical influences.

Reuben: Hi Kelsey, how are you?

Kelsey: I'm pretty good, how about you?

R: I'm good; I've been running around a lot, getting ready for the record release.

K: Oh yeah, when is the release?

R: Well officially, the record is available February 27th, but we're having our record release party in New York City on March 7th at 9:30.

K: Oh that's fun, are you excited?

R: Yeah, I'm totally excited. But I'm running around and just trying to get stuff pulled together and making arrangements and you know making announcement cards, all the fun stuff.

K: So you grew up in San Francisco, and you attended alternative public schools, what was that experience like for you and how did it shape the way you make music?

R: Well you know what, it's like, San Francisco is a hot bed of liberalism and it's one of the coolest cities in the world because it's a place where, at least when I was growing up, during the time I was growing up, diversity was really important and the idea of alternative ways of looking at everything or ways of doing things or stuff like that, was the whole vibe. People are really interested in exploring different cultures and everything. And you know because of my family situation we were not going to be going to any fancy private schools or anything like that. My mom was really interested in nurturing our minds, our bodies and our creative outlets and plus as a single mom she kind of had to keep us busy. So she just was really energetic about getting us into the best programs she could find, if you're going to go to public school, a lot of them are great but she wanted to find the best one. The one with the most interesting academics and interesting teachers and one that would also foster creativity and get us to look at things in different ways. So she found San Francisco Community School, which was a relatively new school at the time. The school also was very against stereotyping, to the point of like if people wanted to be called a she and it was a little boy, that was fine, have long hair and be a boy fine, wear hippie clothes and no underwear, fine. All that kind of stuff, the acceptance, the tolerance was something that I grew up with. That's totally shaped my perspective on how I deal with people and how I interact and my acceptance level of diversity and plus I realize this, and I only realized it in relation to other people as an adult. I was nurtured by my folks, my family, my grandparents to be an artist from the very beginning of my life. It wasn't until after I graduated from college and had to get a job as a pizza delivery boy that I realized, oh wow, no body ever said to me you have to major in business or nursing, because you're going to have to make a living for yourself. No body ever said that to me. I found that out later myself, on my own. I was really nurtured as an artist and I didn't realize that until I was older, but I'm really lucky.

K: So what kind of music were listening to as a kid growing up?

R: Our family would have like Disco dancing sessions. My parents, are relatively young, and they wanted to go out and you know, do the hustle. They would get ready to go disco dancing, pops would put on the three piece suit, and mom would put on the red gorgeous polyester number and they would get their little warm up practice dancing at home before getting ready to go out. So my little sister and I would disco dance. Also my dad was really into the Beatles but my mom didn't like the Beatles. My mom, well both my parents were big Mo-town heads. I listened to tons of mo-town, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, the first phase of Temptations. I was also listening to Jazz standards a little bit. I listened to tons of Baroque music. So I always knew from age 5 onward that I wanted to be a composer, write songs and sing them. In high school, I had my own little doo-wop group, called the Cleartones and we just sang old school mo-town stuff and our own arrangements of stuff. I learned a lot from those guys, singing.

K: While playing with Antony and the Johnson's you worked on your debut album "Dusk" with Steve Bagley and I understand you made most of it in an unheated bedroom in a house in SOHO, how did that whole experience shape the album?

R: Well basically I had this long scholastic lifetime of learning certain things about music but I'd never really besides the doo-wop band in high school had had a band before. And during college in New York at NYU, that's where I met Steve Bagley we were college roommates and after we were done with school we moved into this house. And we were so naïve, we didn't bother to find out, you know does it have adequate hearting, are there no rodents here, because we were like artists. Neither of us had ever had bands, had never played out in New York, never did a gig, and we had saved up some money and we said we could use this money and buy time in an expensive recording studio and record ourselves live, except we didn't' have experience playing live so what were we going to record. Or we could use the money and buy home recording technology, with a computer and do it ourselves. Learn how to both engineer, record and write and perform at the same time. So we opted for that idea. We used to joke that we're desktop musicians.
So how it shaped the music was because we didn't have a band and because I hadn't written songs with a band or with a piano, we made loops. We would make things and cut them up and re record them and tweak them with the computer and then make a bunch of loops. So we made a library of loops and collage them together. Since that album I haven't done it that way again, that's why the albums are so different.

K: Where do you find the most inspiration for writing songs?

R: Oh well…myself. No I'm kidding. (laughs). I think it is myself, it's horrible.

K: It's not horrible, it's truthful.

R: I feel like you know, what are songs supposed to do. Songs are supposed to entertain people, make them forget their troubles, get into a happy place. That's what most main-stream pop music is about, but also the real core of it is the chance to connect with somebody, connect with another human being, connect with people, either to forget your troubles and be happy or to feel a deep emotion together- like a sense of loss or a sense of euphoric happiness. And I think you know, that's the best music, that's why people have music and that's why people get so offended when you make fun of their music because they closely identify themselves with their music choice. So when I've learned something in the course of my life, like maybe I've had to get over a hurdle or a revelation has come to me about how the world works or how people are, I put it into a song and a lot of the songs on this record came from what I learned about myself looking back at my childhood. It's called 'Golden Boy' because I'm from San Francisco and California is the golden state and San Francisco has the Golden Gate.

K: If you weren't a musician what career do you think you would have chosen?

R: Umm a musician. (laughs)

K: Good answer, so what's next for you?

R: We're focused on pulling out all the stops we can at least here in New York to do a big record release to try and leverage the opportunities with Internet. These days do you really need a record label? Ideally yeah, it'd be great to have one because they hook you up with a tour and blah blah blah. But I'm releasing this record myself so I'm hoping to sell copies through the internet. And then we're going to try and do some music videos because that's a good way to bring people into the story of a song, and also it's fun. I've written probably two albums worth of songs so I need to record those too. I'm going to try another approach. The first album was electronica, this one was like a classical/soul/orchestral album and the new one is going to be something else. But maybe I shouldn't let the cat out of the bag yet.