‘Good Grief’ is the first new solo album in 25 years from songwriter and producer Bernard Butler. Between then and now, Butler had ventured into the world of pop songwriting and producing, including two seminal albums with folk musician Sam Lee, a Mercury nominated project with actor Jessie Buckley as well as working with Bert Jansch and Ben Watt From Everything But The Girl, The Libertines, Tricky and an eight-million selling, Grammy-winning record with Duffy.

Of returning to solo work after two and a half decades, Butler says ‘For a good while I was scarred and I was scared. I was happily distracted and joyously involved with so much music. I realised just being there was more than I had ever hoped for. I gave a lot to other people, but realised that my story was defined but what I was, rather than what I am. I set myself a modest commercial goal, an expectant creative one: perform to 10 people without being bottled, then find 11 the next night. Thus began the undoing of my own embarrassment. I would write as I thought and sing as I wrote until the bottles fly. And so, the songs arrived.’

Bernard booked himself into a rehearsal space in Holloway every Wednesday afternoon for months, just him, a guitar and a microphone. The first fruit of these sessions is the new single ‘Camber Sands’, “For years and years I have drawn straight lines from North London to every coastline I could see. To life-worn Londoners escape is the dream and return most likely. The story I found was not the sea but the journey. Camber Sands, Mersea Island, Dunwich, or a dozen more horizons of possibility, the sea and the seawalls, and the endless return to face the city. Camber Sands is a love song - we flee the past, the present, ourselves, to survive, to defy. The loneliest music of the resolute, the half-light and the saddest tunes.’

Round circle shows with friends Norman Blake and James Grant across Scotland gave Butler the taste for venturing back out on stage, and while writing with Jessie Buckley for the Mercury Prize nominated For All Our Days That Tear the Heart album, Bernard tucked away his own discoveries and continued the journey once Buckley returned to the silver screen. Confronting his own songwriting process, he wrote words down, away from the security of his guitar, before carving music around the lines.

‘Good Grief’ finds Bernard Butler owning three decades of work, free to perform, bookended by wildly contrasting experiences of loss, joy, and bewilderment. The album is a journey from city to coast and back, and between it, an entire spectrum of human emotion.

TRACK LISTING

1. Camber Sands
2. Deep Emotions
3. Living The Dream
4. Preaching To The Choir
5. Pretty D
6. The Forty Foot
7. London Snow
8. Clean
9. The Wind

Jessie Buckley and Bernard Butler have joined forces on For All Our Days That Tear The Heart, a collection of twelve mesmerising new songs. The meeting of an Academy Award-nominated actress and singer, and a Brit Award-winning producer and musician, feels like the tale of two distant stars coming together and forming their own constellation.

It all started with a FaceTime call from Butler’s North London kitchen to Buckley’s mountaintop residence in County Kerry, with their friendship growing from an unlikely shared love of Killarney and the small island of Valentia where Butler would go on holiday as a boy. A mutual friend had a feeling they might spark. Buckley had been listening to Old Wow by Sam Lee, produced by Bernard, in the downtime between rehearsals for the National Theatre’s televised production of Romeo and Juliet. Butler had seen Jessie perform a song on an American chat show in promotion of 2018’s Wild Rose. “I remember clocking just how much character there was in her voice and how freely she expressed it,” recalls Bernard.

If the project grew from a shared love and deep ancestral attachment to Ireland - Butler’s parents come from Dun Laoghaire, one of the coastal towns of Dublin Bay - then these songs swoop out from the Emerald Isle’s west coast, taking home Appalachian blues and delicate modal jazz from across the Atlantic, and taking in the bullfighting arenas of Andalusia along the way. The first song the pair wrote together, ‘The Eagle and the Dove’ - named after a book by the interwar proto-feminist writer Vita Sackville-West - set the tone for the project, and also set in motion a sense of adventure that permeates For All Our Days That Tear The Heart. Invoking the passionate theatre of flamenco, augmented by Jessie’s sumptuous, soaring vocals, the pair recorded the intuitive dance moves of Juana Jimenez with a microphone placed on the floor of the Birchanger Village Hall in Essex of all places.

There’s a physicality and a flow to the songs that somehow bear testament to the manner in which Jessie and Bernard threw themselves into making the album. Amid the constant exchange of ideas, songs fomented at speed. The sublime ‘20 Years A Growing’ takes its title from Maurice O’Sullivan’s celebrated 1933 account of life in Great Blasket Island off the coast of County Kerry. The more personal, piano-led ‘Seven Red Rose Tattoos’, captures the essence of loss and longing, with Jessie’s vocal lines a counterpoint to Byron Wallen’s doleful, muted trumpet: “I wanted it to be like a conversation with the ghosts of my thoughts,” says Buckley.

The dynamic title track is built around words that Jessie had written during a low period whilst in Chicago filming Fargo, with her extraordinary vocal blazing an emotional vapour trail through Bernard’s chamber-folk arrangement. And the pair draw inspiration from the ensemble work of seminal jazz-folk innovators Pentangle on songs like ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ and ‘Sweet Child’, as the rhythm section of Misha Mullov-Abbado and Chris Vatalaro effectively converse with Jessie’s bewitching vocals. “Right now, I feel like I’ll never make another album again,” says Jessie, “because I can’t imagine another album happening the way this one did. It’s amazing that it even happened once. This obscure, organic, odd little thing that just found us.”

For All Our Days That Tear The Heart is a remarkable work of windswept beauty and catharsis, and given that it seemed to come out of nowhere, it also feels like a gift. “More than anything, I wanted it to be joyous – properly joyous – because there is such joy in Jessie, there really is,” says Bernard. “In spite of the darkness and the intensity in these songs, I’m just flying when I listen back to them.” 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Buckley and Butler combine their considerable talents into a grand, emotive swell of folky guitars and orchestral instrumentation. Beautifully swinging between folky minimalism with hushed vocals to grand, gothic strings and bold cinematic intensity. Really lovely stuff.

TRACK LISTING

01 - The Eagle & The Dove
02 - For All Our Days That Tear The Heart
03 - 20 Years A-Growing
04 - Babylon Days
05 - Seven Red Rose Tattoos
06 - Footnotes On The Map
07 - We’ve Run The Distance
08 - We Haven’t Spoke About The Weather
09 - Beautiful Regret
10 - I Cried Your Tears
11 - Shallow The Water
12 - Catch The Dust 

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2022 EXCLUSIVE, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

180g White Vinyl - first time on vinyl. Ex-London Suede guitarist Bernard Butler released his first solo album People Move On in 1998, to great critical acclaim and commercial success. This collection brings together on vinyl for the first time a collection of original and re-vocalled B-Sides from the People Move On project. 

In 1994 Bernard Butler left Suede at the end of the lengthy recording sessions for the band’s second album, the acknowledged classic that is “Dog Man Star”, which he cowrote. His first project was to join forces with singer David McAlmont record the album “The Sound Of McAlmont & Butler”, which was released in November 1995. It featured the Top 10 single “Yes” and the follow-up “You Do”.

In 1997, Alan McGee signed Bernard up to Creation Records, and he set about recording his first solo album, playing all the instruments himself, except for the drums and strings. Released in April 1998, the album was a critical and commercial success, reaching # 11 in the UK album charts and features the hit singles “Stay”, “Not Alone” and “Change Of Heart”.

When approached about contributing to this reissue in 2021, Bernard decided that he wanted to re-record all the vocals, for both the album and the B-sides. He has also added the occasional guitar overdub. The new vocals can be found on CD2 and 3. CD4 features some gems from Bernard’s own archives: demos, a rehearsal, solo live tracks, and a selection of fascinating outtakes from the string sessions.

The 28 page book is extensively annotated by Bernard himself, and also contains all the lyrics plus photos from Bernard’s own collection plus unpublished recording session photos from photographer Jill Furmanovsky.

TRACK LISTING

Disc 1:
People Move On
1. Woman I Know
2. You Just Know
3. People Move On
4. A Change Of Heart
5. Autograph
6. You Light The Fire
7. Not Alone
8. When You Grow
9. You've Got What It Takes
10. Stay
11. In Vain
12. I'm Tired
Disc 2:
People Move On [2021 Vocals]
1. Woman I Know
2. You Just Know
3. People Move On
4. A Change Of Heart
5. Autograph
6. You Light The Fire
7. Not Alone
8. When You Grow
9. You've Got What It Takes
10. Stay
11. In Vain
12. I'm Tired
Disc 3:
B-Sides
1. Hotel Splendide
2. The Sea
3. Bye Bye
4. It's Alright
5. My Domain
6. More Than I Thought
B-Sides [2021 Vocals]
7. Hotel Splendide
8. The Sea
9. Bye Bye
10. Bye Bye (Marrakesh)
11. It's Alright
12. My Domain
13. More Than I Thought
Disc 4:
Domfront Demos
1. Woman I Know
2. In Vain
3. You've Got What It Takes
4. Bye Bye
5. Friends & Lovers
Benwell Road Rehearsal
6. People Move On
7. You Just Know
8. Autograph
Upstairs At The Garage
9. People Move On
10. Stay
11. I’m Tired
String Sessions
12. Woman I Know
13. When You Grow
14. A Change Of Heart
15. A Change Of Heart (Bollywood)
16. Not Alone
17. Not Alone (Psycho)
18. The Sea