Rayland Baxter has announced his new album, If I Were A Butterfly out November 4th on ATO. To mark the occasion, the Tennessee-bred Baxter has released the album’s title track and its companion video directed by Citizen Kane Wayne. Steeped in psychedelia, the album opener features a lush collage of horns, flutes, and strings and layered backing vocals from Lennon Stella and Sophia Rose. If I Were A Butterfly was produced by Baxter, Tim O’Sullivan, and Kai Welch and is available for pre-order and pre-save today HERE.

Rayland Baxter on “If I Were A Butterfly”: “‘If I were a butterfly’ is just a song about growing up… looking forward…looking back…about life and death…birth and rebirth…evolution and transformation of the mind, body, and spirit.”

If I Were A Butterfly is the fourth studio album from Rayland Baxter. The album examines loss and existential ruminations on happiness and freedom and was completed in the wake of his father, the legendary Bucky Baxter’s (Bob Dylan’s longtime pedal steel player and member of Steve Earle’s Dukes) passing. His late father appears on the album along with a host of collaborators including Shakey Graves, Zac Cockrell of Alabama Shakes, members of Cage the Elephant, Stella, Rose, Morning Teleportation’s Travis Goodwin, and legendary Motown drummer Miss Bobbye Hall, among many others. If I Were A Butterfly was in large part recorded while Baxter was living alone at Thunder Sound, an abandoned rubber-band factory turned studio in Kentucky with later sessions taking place in California, Tennessee, Texas and Washington. 

The Nashville eccentric and ever-evolving journeyman’s most recent release was Good Mmornin, a tribute to the late Mac Miller. Prior to that he released three full-length studio albums – Wide Awake, Imagainery Man, feathers & fishHooks and the EP ashkeLON. Rayland Baxter will be on tour throughout 2022 and 2023. Full tour dates are below.  “Baxter tends to keep his references oblique, working his commentary into the fabric of storytelling that leaves equal space for love songs and humorous vignettes,” said Rolling Stone. Popmatters notes that  “the amount of craft evident in Baxter’s lyricism borders on breathtaking at times.” It’s this wit and songcraft that is so front and center on If I Were A Butterfly, Baxter’s most fully evolved and wisest body of work to date, but it also bears the sonic freedom of someone who’s got nothing left to lose. 

Photo Courtesy: Citizen Kane Wayne