Former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler has stayed busy over the last two decades as a producer and collaborator (David McAlmont, The Libertines, Ben Watt, Jessie Buckley, more) but hasn’t released a solo album since 1999’s Friends and Lovers. That is about to change, as he’s announce Good Grief, his third album under his own name, will be out May 31 via 355 Recordings.
“For a good while, I was scarred, and I was scared,” Butler says of what led him to this new album. “I was happily distracted and joyously involved with so much music. I realized just being there was more than I had ever hoped for. I gave a lot to other people but realized that my story was defined by 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.”
The first single from Good Grief is “Camber Sands,” a windswept, orchestral song named for a beach town in East Sussex, UK that music fans might know of as one of the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival locations. “For years and years, I have drawn straight lines from North London to every coastline I could see,” he says. “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.”
Listen to “Camber Sands” below.
Good Grief
01 “Camber Sands”
02 “Deep Emotions”
03 “Living The Dream”
04 “Preaching To The Choir”
05 “Pretty D”
06 “The Forty Foot”
07 “London Snow”
08 “Clean”
09 “The Wind”