Butch Walker - Stay Gold album review

Americana storyteller finds beauty in the minutiae of life

Butch Walker Stay Gold album cover

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Butch Walker’s previous album, Afraid Of Ghosts, written in the wake of his father’s death, was his darkest. Stay Gold finds him facing the future by looking backwards, on a record stuffed with homages to the artists who inspired him, from Bruce Springsteen to The Pretenders.

Lyrically, especially, this is a portrait of Springsteen’s America, the opening title track placing us among the mill workers of Walker’s Georgia home own and celebrating their bar-room sense of positivity in a dead-end town. Each track is a short story, a beautifully composed snapshot of a moment in a life, all set to choruses masterfully crafted to slot in alongside the radio-rock classics of the 1980s.

Emma has been writing about music for 25 years, and is a regular contributor to Classic Rock, Metal Hammer, Prog and Louder. During that time her words have also appeared in publications including Kerrang!, Melody Maker, Select, The Blues Magazine and many more. She is also a professional pedant and grammar nerd and has worked as a copy editor on everything from film titles through to high-end property magazines. In her spare time, when not at gigs, you’ll find her at her local stables hanging out with a bunch of extremely characterful horses.