Piper Butcher On Working With Kasey Chambers And Connecting With Author Susan Francis

Piper Butcher is celebrating her 21st birthday with her first trip to Nashville. The way things have been going for the Newcastle-based singer-songwriter, one suspects it won’t be her last trip to Nashville.

Butcher won Young Achiever of the Year at the CMAA Achiever Awards last November. She supported Brad Cox on a couple of regional tours in March and May. Her latest single, Hard Love, reached #44 in the Countrytown Hot 50.

Butcher has also recently supported Killing Heidi and Wade Forster, and she appeared at this year’s Tamworth Country Music Festival. It’s been a busy period, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary for Butcher, who has been performing in pubs and clubs since she was 13.

“I always had my parents there, of course,” Butcher tells Countrytown. “They were always my number one champions from day dot, helping me when I couldn't even drive to my first gigs.”

Butcher’s first gigs were at the Wednesday night open mic at Newcastle’s Peppertown Coffee Bar, which was run by musicians Michael and Melody Moko.

“I met Mel and she asked me to open for her album launch for one of her early albums, The Wreckage,” Butcher says. “And I met Fanny Lumsden when I was 13, and I just couldn't believe it. We were both on the same lineup. Everybody was beginning their A-grade careers and I was just soaking it up in the background being the opening act. It was the most awesome thing.”

Hard Love came out in June. In a social media post, Butcher described it as a song about “pushing yourself to your own limits, trusting and loving who you are, and never being afraid of how you feel.”

Butcher began writing the song as a way of encouraging herself to open up and love someone else. “I’ve been hurt before,” she says, “as everybody's experienced at least once in their life.” But in the course of writing and recording Hard Love, Butcher realised the song was about loving herself. 

“It's an upbeat little cruisy number, and I'm in the studio thinking, ‘Holy crap, this is a lot for me right now,’” she says.

“It was such a confronting part of the process to realise, while I was singing and tracking, that this song that I wrote was actually about me trusting myself and that saying that if you don't love yourself and if you don't come first, you're not going to really get that same love back from other people.”

Hard Love followed the three-track Start of Something EP, which came out in March. Butcher recorded the EP live at Rabbit Hole Recording Studios with producers Brandon Dodd and Kasey Chambers. The opportunity to work with Chambers and Dodd came via the Bluesfest Busking Competition, where Butcher was a finalist two years ago. 

“It's always one of the best nights because there's so many hidden people in the crowd,” Butcher says of the competition final at Byron’s Beach Hotel.

While she ultimately wasn’t victorious, Butcher took home the People's Choice Award. Chambers was in the crowd at the final and Dodd was one of the judges.

“It got announced that I got a day in the studio with Kasey,” Butcher says. “I ran up to her after everything was over and I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I just loved [it], especially this song in the middle that you did.’ It was amazing to just hear how she felt and how she was drawn to it all.”

Butcher sent Chambers three songs and asked her to select one for them to work on together. “Her and Brando called me up maybe a week afterwards,” Butcher says. “And she said, ‘Look, we can't choose. Really sorry, but we're going to have to do all three.’ And I completely lost my mind.”

 It was Chambers’ idea for Butcher to record the whole thing live. “That was such a scary thing for me,” Butcher says. “It was amazing for them to trust me in that way.”

The EP’s title track, Start of Something, is based on author Susan Francis’ memoir The Love That Remains, an unbelievable tale of adoption, love, bereavement, and murder. Around the time she discovered the book, Butcher was asked to participate in the Words & Music showcase at the Newcastle Writers Festival.

“I had to choose a book and use an excerpt of it to write a song,” she says. “And I just immediately knew that it was going to be Susan's book. After hearing that story, just something deep down connected me to it.”

Before the event, Butcher learned that Francis lived in Morpeth, just outside of Newcastle. So, she reached out and asked if she’d like to join her at the Writers Festival.

“She came and she read the excerpt of the book the same night that I performed it live,” Butcher says. “It was amazing the connection that I felt with her. She reminds me so much of my nan, who unfortunately has passed away. So it was a very emotional night.”

To date, Butcher has operated completely independently. She’s proud of how far she’s come without a label or management, but she’s not stubbornly hanging on to her independence.

“I'm so grateful for the opportunities that I've had as an independent artist,” she says. “I think I'm really lucky as an independent artist that I'm able to move around and work with so many different channels of people and take from their learnings and put it into my own independent music.

“But that's not to say I am not looking for a team. I just really want to find someone that can share the workload. I'm in the process of looking for a champion that can help me spread out this workload and help me find those bigger opportunities.

“I am on the lookout for a friend to help me here. This shit ain't easy.”