John Butler, the Dublin-based songwriter behind Stray Planets, has never been afraid to blur the lines between the real and the unreal. His new EP Are You Real, Cristobal Leedy? – out on November 7th – is a kaleidoscopic trip through modern identity, digital obsession, and the strange poetry of the algorithmic age.
It feels a bit like music that wrestles with meaning while keeping its heart wide open. And while it’s witty, philosophical, and emotional, it also just slaps. So it’s especially great to hear a little more about it’s upcoming release, which will be available to stream and on Bandcamp.
What is it about your 19-year-old self that feels like the barometer of quality for you? I really love the idea, but I can’t quite explain why.
My 19-year old self was an extremely enthusiastic consumer of music – scouring the plains of allmusic.com in search of great lost-ish pop – The Left Banke, Eternity’s Children, The Sandpipers and so on. I loved to raid the nuggets section of Tower Records, buying albums (unwittingly) on the strength of the cover art. I remember buying the soundtrack to the Pufnstuf movie there and listening in a nearby park and thinking it was the greatest thing ever (“If I Could” is genuinely moving though).
I have mostly lost that passion now, the mystery is gone, I am too aware of how narrative and image affects your perception of music (luckily I still love making music – if I lose that I’m screwed). My 19-year old self would dig my stuff, I feel.
The production on this EP is incredible, particularly on Salvia. I love the drum sound. You’ve worked again with Rían Trench, and I’d love to hear a little bit about how you two built that world together.
Thank you! That’s Rian – a master producer and multi-instrumentalist (also a great filmmaker and singer, the bastard). I worked briefly with him before Stray Planets on another project (the yet to be unveiled 1% Visible). It’s beautifully symbiotic, like my relationship with Liam Mulvaney (with whom I’ve recorded a ton of unreleased concept albums), I am a supplier of raw materials (i.e. songs) and they shape them into something great.
I only play keys – I’m big into chord progressions – I can produce and arrange when I want to, but I am not an expert builder of soundscapes and my own productions tend to sound two-dimensional (ok if the song is light and comedic but not if the subject matter is weightier). My job is songwriter.
The EP wrestles with themes of artifice and authenticity in the digital age. What first sparked your fascination with the “algorithmic unreality” behind Are You Real, Cristobal Leedy?
I often tend to just write about stuff happening immediately around me (psychedelic version of Randy Newman in Family guy maybe) so given I increasingly find myself lying in bed staring at my phone in a state of blank, helpless confusion, I’m likely to write about that.
Like I have a demo called “My Red Dot” which is based on the feeling of gratification I get when logging into Instagram and finding someone has liked my post and then the subsequent disappointment… (“But my red dot is only a porn bot”).
Obviously that last example is a throwaway. If I am recording “serious” music (like with Stray Planets) I’d try make the song a bit vaguer and open to interpretation. I’d try, for instance, to not use words like “algorithm” because if the internet suddenly disappeared and subsequent generations didn’t know what the fuck an algorithm was, then these songs might still be interpretable in a completely different way (that is if they haven’t been wiped off the face of the planet). Actually maybe “algorithm” is a cool word to use, it’s been around long before the internet, hasn’t it? I wouldn’t use a word like “email” or… ermmm…. “BCC”.
Also, my knowledge of AI (and most things) is pretty shallow. That helps as a songwriter – makes you less weighed down. Means I’m pretty bad at real life conversations with educated people though.
You’ve described Your Revolution as a song about AI’s inability to suffer. How do you think suffering can channel into creativity? Sometimes it’s just suffering.
I wrote that song at 5am when I woke to discover I had spilled a two litre bottle of water across my bed – perhaps it was inspired by the notion that even if AI has absorbed and can convincingly mimic all works of art, it could never truly know just how pathetic I feel right now.
The song isn’t my opinion either, it’s just a perspective – namely how AI will never know what it’s like to feel trapped in your own thoughts, too aware of your breathing, your body, your fragility. It’s a spiritual idea I suppose, wishful thinking maybe, that you can’t reduce the complexity of the human mind to ones and zeros.
Having said that, I did ask Chat GPT to describe what it’s like being inside the head of someone with Aphasia and its extremely vivid answer immediately reduced me to tears (someone in my life has that condition).
How do you think about psychedelia in terms of looking back but also looking forward?
Psychedelia is quite a broad term and means different things to different people. I used to think of ‘psychedelic pop’ as pop that isn’t shit/unimaginative. I am not so keen on labels but I guess they’re a necessary evil when wishing to find an audience already negotiating a vast musical landfill.
For me, psychedelic music is music that takes you to another place, evokes something beyond the image of the musicians/singers performing it.
It can be anything – “Greensleeves”; “Sweet Leilani”; all of “Remain in Light”. Or take even say a song like “Always Something There to Remind Me” (Sandie Shaw version) by Bacharach. I classify that as psychedelic because it just creates this really odd feeling in me and takes me somewhere else.
When I used to get high, one of my go-to songs was “Are you there with Another Boy” by the Buckinghams, another Bacharach tune that many would dismiss as easy listening mush but for whatever reason I found oddly powerful/evocative. Sorry I probably haven’t answered your question.
Thank you to John, very excited to have been able to chat.
If you’d like to check out the lovely alternate reality in ‘Are You Real, Cristobal Leedy? – which almost feels like a mirror held up to our fractured times – you can check it out below.