Kaitlin Butts likes things with a little volume to them. Big stories, loud clothes, old Westerns, and women who don’t apologize.
“I love loud, rambunctious, wild women,” she says.
At 15, Kaitlin was drawn to artists like Miranda Lambert, the Chicks, and Taylor Swift.
“They had just this fire on stage that I felt like I had myself,” she says. “I would see that and be like, that is what I want to be.”
While Kaitlin was inspired by the women of country, the genre was only a sample of what she was listening to. Growing up in Tulsa, she was a musical theater kid who tap danced to Johnny Cash, performed Annie Get Your Gun with a rifle strapped to her back, and listened to rock, pop, rap, emo, and anything else that made its way into the mix. She picked up a guitar and later studied at the Academy of Contemporary Music at UCO, but she never stopped thinking like a theater kid.
On her 2024 album, Roadrunner!, Kaitlin built a world of her own with inspiration from both country music and musical theater. She shaped the record around Oklahoma!, watching the movie somewhere around 40 times while she worked. On the vinyl, every song has a timestamp marking the scene where she imagines it. And of Ado Annie, Oklahoma!’s uninhibited scene-stealer? Kaitlin says she could play her at a moment’s notice.
“That’s the one character that I really feel like I could be tomorrow,” she says. “I know the lines.”
Kaitlin’s love of theater extends into the Western world that surrounds her music. She’s drawn to the drama of the stories, the clothes, the twang, and the visual language of the West, though her own relationship to it has always been more cinematic than literal.
Photo by Justin Cook
“I don’t feel like I’m an actual cowgirl,” she says. “[I feel like] I’m on the movie set of a cowgirl scene.”
And some of her videos have actually been filmed on movie sets, including locations used in Django Unchained and Holes. Kaitlin likes the facade of it all. The heightened characters, the theatricality, even the sense that if you leaned too hard against the scenery, the whole thing might give way.
If the world of Roadrunner! was already waiting for her in Oklahoma!, Kaitlin’s upcoming album Hello, Honky Tonk, releasing October 30th, came together in reverse.
“You Ain’t Gotta Die” had gone viral, and suddenly Kaitlin had an album to make. Her calendar filled with writing sessions alongside Natalie Hemby, Shane McAnally, Lori McKenna, Jessi Alexander, and Jon Randall.
“The Avengers of songwriting,” Kaitlin calls them.
Soon, Kaitlin had six or seven songs ready to show her label, but she wasn’t sure yet where they fit. In search of a home for these songs, Kaitlin spent about 16 hours listening back through demos and work tapes, trying to find the thread connecting them. At first, she thought she might be making an album of mantras, little truths that people could come back to, but some songs just didn’t fit. When she tried to picture them, she kept seeing a bar instead.
One song in particular gave shape to the world she had been circling, a honky tonk after dark. “Midnight I’ll Always Be Yours,” written with Jon Randall and Jessi Alexander.
“It’s like my version of Goodnight Moon, but for a honky tonk,” she says.
Kaitlin spends a lot of time looking around bars, watching people from a table or, when she can see past the stage lights, from behind a microphone. Are those two on a first date? What’s the story with the guy drinking alone? Has the woman at the bar noticed the man beside her looking at somebody else?
“I’m gathering their stories as I’m up there,” she says. “The art of noticing. That’s my favorite thing.”
Hello, Honky Tonk is full of what she has noticed: the bartender behind the counter, the lonely drinker, the girls going to the bathroom to powder their noses and talk shit about their boyfriends.
“I love to put the spotlight on different people in that room,” Kaitlin says.
She likes the stories that get better after dark. Kaitlin says she starts waking up around 9 pm, and the nightlife she writes about is the same one she lives in.
“It really is like a love letter to the people that support and love the nightlife,” she says.
For Kaitlin, the honky tonk doesn’t end with the album’s track list. It influences the videos, the artwork, and everything surrounding the record. For the hand-drawn Hello, Honky Tonk cover, she went back and forth with longtime collaborator Pecos McCool until the details felt right.
“I feel like that’s what makes a good artist,” she says. “Really caring about those little things. Even if people don’t notice it, it’s kind of for you anyway.”
For the videos, Kaitlin wrote the treatments almost like a musical, imagining the songs as one continuous show with characters moving between them. Then she and the team, led by director Chris Beyrooty, shot eight videos in two days.
Chris first worked with Kaitlin on Roadrunner! and now knows how to take her very specific ideas, where a lyric should hit, how a transition should move, and make them happen.
“He’s not scared of my mania,” she says.
With Chris, she can say what she sees, even when she doesn’t quite have the technical language for it, and trust him to take it somewhere further.
Photo by Justin Cook
In the writing room, Kaitlin also gravitates toward collaborators who both respect her vision and bring plenty of their own ideas to it. With Natalie Hemby, there always seems to be another way into a line. If something doesn’t quite sound right in Kaitlin’s mouth, Natalie is already reaching for another idea.
“She’s so much of a genius that she’s like, ‘Yeah, I can think of 19,000 different ways to say this.’”
Kaitlin’s own voice has gotten easier for her to recognize. She likes shock-value humor. She likes women who are big and funny and occasionally inappropriate, the way women can be when nobody in the room is asking them to make themselves easier to take.
“I just want to empower people to feel more like who they are behind closed doors with their girlfriends,” she says.
After a Ryman show, a woman in her 60s waited near the merch table visibly upset. She told Kaitlin that she had come with a man and, after watching his reaction to Kaitlin’s set, was beginning to wonder whether she wanted to leave with him. Kaitlin’s “feminine boldness,” she said, had exposed something about her date.
As far as Kaitlin was concerned, there was only one reasonable response: “Get out of there, Queen.”
Kaitlin is used to getting a reaction. Her mom has had a front-row seat for years, usually delighted, occasionally concerned, and always ready to offer a gut check. The two could hardly be more different. Her mom, a teacher from Oklahoma who hates attention and gets nervous watching Kaitlin perform, has become one of her most reliable sounding boards.
Photo by Madison Hudson
When Kaitlin played her a new song that opens with the line “big lips, big tits,” her mom asked whether she was sure that was how she wanted to say it.
“Yeah. I do wanna say that, Mom,” Kaitlin remembers. “As a matter of fact, I’m gonna say it with my whole chest.”
For all her caution, Kaitlin’s mom was always the one pulling her toward new music. She bought tickets to artists Kaitlin didn’t know yet just because she’d heard they were good. Brandi Carlile was one. She found festivals and cruises, rooms full of songwriters and performers that gave a young Kaitlin something to look toward.
“My mom’s always been the person that finds the cool thing,” Kaitlin says.
Luck Reunion was one of those things.
Before Kaitlin ever played the ranch, she and her mom were the fans following the pages, waiting for access codes, and doing “all the crazy shit” required to get tickets. Once they made it through the gates, Kaitlin watched. She remembers falling for Elle King there. Another year, when she couldn’t get into the chapel for Noah Gundersen, she stuck her head through a window to catch his set anyway. She was still a beginner artist then, watching performances she now describes as transformative.
There was free booze, too.
“It’s like a dream,” Kaitlin says.
When she eventually got a booking agent, playing Luck went straight onto her list.
“It’s always been on my have-to-play list.”
Photo by Justin Cook
This year, she finally crossed it off. The tent was packed, and Kaitlin knew exactly what kind of effort some of the people standing in front of her had made, because she had spent years doing it herself – plotting festival schedules and standing in the Texas heat to get in front of the artist she had decided she needed to see.
From the stage, one person kept catching her eye: a young security guard near the front who knew every word. Kaitlin watched her throughout the set. Later that night, on the way to see Willie, she spotted the same woman with a group of security guards and stopped to thank her for watching. The woman screamed.
“She made me feel like Taylor Swift,” Kaitlin says.
Touring can leave her depleted, she says, and there are days when she wonders whether any of it is landing. Moments like that make the harder parts worth it.
“I don’t care if every single one of them hated that show,” she says. “That girl liked it right there.”
As the stages grow, Kaitlin chases the intimacy of a room where she can see the people in front of her. She points to Gruene Hall as the kind of place where she feels most connected to a crowd. At Gruene Hall, there’s no air conditioning, the bathrooms are gross, and her green room is close enough to the men’s room that she can hear men moving around while she warms up. The room gets hot and sweaty and a little grimy, but everyone is close enough to feel part of the same thing.
It’s the world at the center of Hello, Honky Tonk. A killer band might still cost ten or twenty dollars to see. The room is small enough to catch somebody’s eye across it. The person next to you may not look or dress anything like you, but then the song starts and you both know the words. And for all the characters, costumes, movie sets, and imagined barrooms surrounding her music, what Kaitlin wants from the real thing is pretty simple.
“We need human connection,” Kaitlin says. “And we need honky tonks.”
