For nearly the first three decades of his life, Rayland Baxter kept a healthy distance from the stage. Despite the fact that his late father “Bucky” was an established multi-instrumentalist — whose resume includes work with Steve Earle, Bob Dylan, The Beastie Boys and more — the younger Baxter managed to avoid the call of the spotlight. Until he couldn’t anymore.
Baxter first caught the bug during a stint in Colorado. He was working as a snowboard instructor at Vail Resorts and playing open mics at the Gold Pan Saloon in Breckenridge, where the Tennessee-born songwriter sharpened his emerging skills in front of a modest crowd each Wednesday.
The proverbial duck to water, Baxter glided onto the national scene with 2012’s Feathers & Fish Hooks and subsequent offerings Imaginary Man and Wide Awake. After paying tribute to the late Mac Miller with a largely self-produced EP in 2019, Baxter continues his evolution on his latest album, If I Were a Butterfly.
Gestating throughout the early gasps of the COVID-19 pandemic, Baxter’s Butterfly plays with genre and sound in a manner recalling late-era Beatles or the ever-chimerical David Bowie. It’s a mixtape of the artist's life, a reaching back and hurling forward that, like its title suggests, chronicles his metamorphosis.
“That's what we're doing,” Baxter, 41, says. “That Bob Dylan documentary where he says, ‘An artist is always in a state of becoming.’ Zooming out, a human, we're all becoming — even on our deathbed. There's always the next chapter.”
‘I leaned on myself’
For his latest chapter, Baxter set up hearth and shop at Thunder Sound Studios in Franklin, Kentucky. Often described as an “abandoned rubber band factory,” the description belies the location’s world-class recording space, living facility, event venue and pastoral allure amid 100 acres of Bluegrass State beauty, offering all the amenities of artistic freedom Baxter could want as the pandemic crashed down around him.
With no prospect of touring and no immediate call from his home base ATO Records to issue an album, Baxter found an opportunity at Thunder Sound to take his time and stretch out into the creative process.
“I was there for a year, where the Swayze family rented me the studio for very cheap,” Baxter says in reference to the family of songwriter Billy Swayze, who founded the studio in 2016 before dying three short years later in a car crash. “There was no time limit — that was ideal incubation for an artist of any kind, whether you're a chef, a painter, musician, or a mechanic.”
“All of these things were at my fingertips and I was allowed to become more of a defined ‘me’ in that time,” he continues. “It's the first record I've made where I leaned on myself a lot, thanks to the encouragement of guys like Shakey Graves, my friend Wes Schultz in The Lumineers and my dad. I love recording with producers, but this was my time to do this thing, and just be with my friends … there was no pressure."
Hitting different
The Butterfly title track and album opener mines family home recordings — a four-year-old Rayland singing — before easing into arpeggio, reverb-drenched drum beats and Prince-like guitar flourishes. As the record soldiers on, dedicated headphones listeners will find sonic Easter eggs hidden throughout.
“We always refer to it as walking down a hallway after hours of your elementary school, mixed with The Labyrinth and the walk through the maze,” Baxter says.
Highlights among the 10 tracks on Butterfly include the Tom Waits-ish “Tadpole,” the almost Gregorian “Violence,” the Sgt. Pepper-y” “Dirty Knees” (with its trumpet and claim that “the heart is a beautiful instrument”) and the deceptive funk of “Buckwheat,” a blend of impressionistic poetry and social commentary partly exploring his father’s unexpected death in 2020.
“The dogs in the chorus, those are all my dad's dogs from childhood: ‘Chester, Chapel, Fiona, Moondog and Willy with the one eye blue,’” he says. “I was laying in my van one night, and that [line] just fit in the beat of the chorus. The bridge of that song, that's about a dream I had the morning my dad passed. Before I knew [he died], he came to me in a dream. I was in Hawaii, and he was glowing white.”
For those curious to how Baxter intends to carry the mosaic of all the family history coloring If I Were a Butterfly on tour — stopping at Denver’s Mission Ballroom on June 17 in support of alt-country headliners Houndmouth — the artist says it’s a challenge he’s eager to embrace.
“I knew that it was going to be a little tricky when I was making the album. To really pull it off live … I would need 12 people in the band,” Baxter says. “[But] a song should exist in all forms. It should exist as a poetry reading, a chapter in a book. The President of the United States should be able to read it and it makes sense to somebody, or with a symphony and anything in between. It might sound a little different than the record, but it's going to pump in a whole new way."
ON THE BILL: Houndmouth with Rayland Baxter. 8 p.m. Friday, Jan. 17, Mission Ballroom, 4242 Wynkoop St., Denver. $40+
Looking for more opening acts to catch in 2025? Read all about the artists supporting your favorite bands on the Front Range this year.