Sunrise Over Sea: Track-by-track with John Butler"Treat Yo Mama" -- "Most of us have been raised to treat our parents with respect. Yet, we live a world where our leaders do very little to treat our planet with respect. And it's no big deal for them to trash our Mother Earth. It may sound hippie-ish and cliche, but it's important to respect the plant as our mother, as well as our real families, because without her, there's nothing.""Peaches & Cream" -- "It's about me concentrating a little less on all the bad things in the world and realizing that having a beautiful life and a lovely, healthy ...
Sunrise Over Sea: Track-by-track with John Butler
"Treat Yo Mama" -- "Most of us have been raised to treat our parents with respect. Yet, we live a world where our leaders do very little to treat our planet with respect. And it's no big deal for them to trash our Mother Earth. It may sound hippie-ish and cliche, but it's important to respect the plant as our mother, as well as our real families, because without her, there's nothing."
"Peaches & Cream" -- "It's about me concentrating a little less on all the bad things in the world and realizing that having a beautiful life and a lovely, healthy child is just an amazing thing. My little girl actually opened my eyes up to how many great things are going on around me. And that human beings are not integrally bad," he laughs.
"Company Sin" -- "That's a mixture of many different stories I've heard from friends who are indigenous to Australia. And they're always stories about people going to places that are very sacred that you're not that to visit unless you have permission or have been initiated or have a knowledge of that land. If you do without permission, you're going to be humbugged or cursed with bad luck. I've heard so many stories about it, and this is all of them put into one. A young man is working on a mine and trashing yet another part of our country -- but this part happens to be extremely sacred. And so he ends up with some very bad karma."
"What You Want" -- "It's just about trying to keep love alive over a telephone line what I'm constantly on the road. Maintaining that spark with my wife and my family -- and also the pain that comes with that separation."
"Damned To Hell" -- "Karma again. It's about those huge companies that pollute most of our air and water. I know we as individuals do the same thing -- but some of these huge multinational companies constantly do their best to stop laws that could make this world a better place just so they can make more profit. So the song is dedicated to those CEOs who are doing their damnedest to trash things for their profit. And they may not pay for it and this lifetime but somewhere, someday they will reap the real rewards for those deeds. I often dedicate it to Dick Cheney at most of my concerts."
"Hello" -- "It was very inspired by one friend in particular, but it's based on several stories I've heard about good people you love to end up ripping you off because they've gotten so far in to drugs."
"Bound To Rumble" -- "I've been on the road almost constantly for seven or eight years now. And I met my wife on the road during a beautiful journey while I was doing this circular navigation around Australia. So it's a story about me meeting my wife on the road -- and our life on the road. It's about us being Gypsies in a way. Or circus folk."
"Seeing Angels" -- "Also about meeting my wife. And just celebrating the fact that I can't believe she's in my life but how thankful I am that I have such a wise, amazing woman who teaches me so much."
"There'll Come A Time" -- "A bit of a dark song that I wrote a few years ago about the inevitability of our actions as humans and how if we keep going in this direction, it's not going to be a pretty thing. It's looking at the situation and wondering, 'Well, God, how do we change this?' And it's such an individual approach because you can't really change 10,000 people all at once and tell them they're doing things wrong. In the end, all you can't really do is love yourself and hope that everyone around you laws themselves enough to respect each other and respect the planet. And don't want to go to war and kill each other. It's about loving yourself and the planet to create a better world."
"Zebra" -- "It's a song about not being pigeonholed, basically. And about balance. It was a long time after Three had been released, and people just seemed to see me as a tree-hugging muso hippie. So the song for me was to say, 'You really don't know who I am.' Because I'm also a businessman. I'm also a father. I'm also a real smartass at times. As much as I try to be very sincere and very heartfelt, I can also be a pretty cutting, sarcastic asshole. So that was the song that just blows all preconceived perceptions open and saying, 'Hey, I can be all these things." As long as I have some balance, that's the main thing that's going to get me through a keep me evolving."
"Mist" -- "That's an old instrumental off my first busking cassette. I just felt it really deserve to have a life outside of that. I don't busk anymore, so it doesn't get played a lot. And I always liked to put at least one instrumental on an album to keep my ties with my roots."
"Oldman" -- "It's about old man who just sits back one day and says, 'Wow, the whole world has changed.' And it's a luck at just how much the world has changed in the last 40 years. It's sometimes seems unbelievable to me that less than 60 years ago, we didn't even have TV. And less than 20 years after that, we were watching a man on the moon. Finally, it's about the changes that have occurred politically as we've slowly watched our society become more about martial law and more of a police-like state everyday. Ten years ago, I remember buying water and thinking, 'This is a joke. People are never going to buy water.' And now that's all I do. It's just unbelievable to watch this world and the rate we're movie at the moment."
"Sometimes" -- "About a relationship coming to an end for reasons where no one's actually to blame. We all have relationships like that, where we have good friends and our lives but we just end up moving in different directions. The more you try to think about it and put it into words and thoughts and try to justify why it's happening, it just gets confusing and usually causes more pain. So sometimes you've just got to let things go."
© WMGG/tbe
