The off-kilter playfulness of ANNA BUTTERSS

Photos by Robbie Jeffers

Anna Butterss is a bassist and composer hailing from Adelaide, Australia. She has performed, recorded and toured with a wide array of artists including Phoebe Bridgers, Jenny Lewis, Madison Cunningham, Bright Eyes and Aimee Mann.

In her career as a jazz bassist Butterss has performed with Jeff Parker, Larry Goldings, Makaya McCraven, Chris Speed and Walter Smith III, among others. In 2020 she contributed writing and arrangements to several songs by Karen O and Ben Goldwasser for the feature-length film Where is Anne Frank? Butterss has been living, working and creating in Los Angeles since 2014.

Her debut album Activities is out July 8 on LA’s innovative Colorfield Records.

Interview by Interlocutor Magazine

The genesis of Activities sounds almost accidental - you were invited by Pete Min of Colorfield Records to "mess around" in his studio, Lucy's Meat Market, for a day, but you ultimately wound up developing the full album and recording it there. Was there any particular moment you can remember while in the studio when you realized you wanted to do a whole lot more than just noodle around? Had you been considering releasing a full album of your own or did this all come together very organically?

Making a solo album wasn’t something I was planning to do, at least in any kind of concrete timeframe, but when Pete contacted me to explain his concept for the label I got pretty excited about the idea of making a record with him. I’ve known Pete for years and his studio is one of my favorite places to make music. On the first day we started with a short chord progression and layered parts until we had the bones of what became “Number One”, and I found that process compelling enough that I wanted to keep going. We made another two songs over the following two days and at that point I felt ready to commit to making a whole record with him.

Do you think Activities would have been a very different work if it hadn't been developed in the unique musical incubator of Min's studio? We recently interviewed Benny Bock, whose debut album Vanishing Act was also formulated at Min's studio, and he spoke of the prioritization there of using first takes, not overthinking, and a general stripping away of anything extraneous as key to the sound on his record. Was this also your experience? What particular aspects about working with Min do you think helped take the creation of Activities into unexpected directions? 

Oh, without question it wouldn’t have come together in the way that it did if I hadn’t been working with Pete. For one thing, I’m really in my head a lot of the time about writing music, and Pete works so fast that it almost wasn’t possible for me to dwell on whether an idea was “good” or not. And I trust his musicality and that he’ll tell me how he really feels. There were points where I’d tell him I didn’t like a particular song and he was good at pinpointing what wasn’t working, and what we might do to try to solve it. He was encouraging me to play all kinds of instruments that I don’t normally play, and that ended up generating some pretty interesting material. The general atmosphere was one of creative freedom and heavy experimentation.

Activities - Colorfield Records

Activities explores such a wide scope of sound and style yet to my ear it retains an overall theme of playfulness and a kind of bouncy/flowing movement. With all the variations from song to song, what do you think is a main thematic throughline for the album, if there is one?

Playfulness is a good way to describe it. I was trying to subvert expectations while still keeping the music engaging, almost hooky. I’m a sucker for a singable melody, but I want it to be a little off-kilter in some way, to feel surprising. And I wanted to express a lot of complicated and conflicting emotions, feelings that are difficult to put into words.

So maybe the through-line would be something like “Ugly Beauty”, to borrow from Thelonious Monk.

The videos for the songs "Doo Wop" and "Super Lucrative" nicely match the collage-like nature of the music with similarly colorful cutout-style animation and low-fi visual effects. Could you talk about the concepts behind these videos and how closely you worked with Dustin Laurenzi (for "Doo Wop") and John Herndon (for "Super Lucrative") on putting them together?

With “Super Lucrative”, I knew right away that I wanted Johnny to make something for it. He’s a good friend and I love his visual style, which immediately came to mind when I thought about doing a video for that song. I just sent him the song and gave him free reign - I knew he’d come up with something that would surprise me, and that was more exciting to me than asking him to do something specific.

The video for “Doo Wop” was a little different in that I was wondering about making the whole thing myself, so I was already filming footage when I asked Dustin to work on it. The only thing I was set on was having my friends sing the “ooh wahs” because I thought it was kind of funny, and after that I didn’t give him any specific instructions. Dustin is another old friend, and I’d seen some of his videos for his band Snaarj so I knew he’d come up with something interesting. Most importantly, both John and Dustin are truly incredible musicians and I love their musical sensibilities, so I knew that when they listened to the songs they’d be able to represent the music visually from a really deep place.

As a bassist, you have collaborated with so many talented people (Aimee Mann, Phoebe Bridgers, Makaya McCraven, Jeff Parker, among others). How has this long history of collaboration affected your approach as a songwriter? Some musicians are "bedroom artists" who write so much on their own, but could you even conceive of that approach? Has collaboration become essential for you for writing music? 

It’s been really special to work with such wonderful artists over the years, and especially to get to move between genres, approaches and aesthetics. I think being exposed to so many distinct creative processes has expanded my musical imagination in a way that has allowed me more freedom when I write. I feel like I’m always learning something new about process when I work with other artists, and elements of that maybe come out later in my own music in some way. Activities was a collaboration with Pete and that approach led us to some really interesting places, but most of the music I’ve written before that was just me, including several pieces that were reworked for the record.

What are the plans for live performances to support Activities? What excites you the most about playing these songs before an audience? Do you see a lot of room for improvisation with playing these songs live? Are there plans to include your collaborators on the album (Josh Johnson, Ben Lumsdaine, and Christian Euman) in live shows, or will there be different players?

I am excited to play this music live, although I think it will be a challenge, both musically in translating this studio-created music into a live performance and logistically just in getting the right people together at the same time to do that. I wouldn’t want a live performance to sound exactly like the record - I am imagining a lot of space for the music to evolve and for everyone to add their own interpretations, so improvisation would be a big part of that. Ideally I would have Josh, Ben and Christian involved, along with one of my all-time favorite musicians and dearest friends Greg Uhlmann and have us all kind of moving between different instruments. I don’t just want to play bass the whole time, now I know how fun it is to play guitar.

Activities is available July 8 on Colorfield Records

Check out all of our other coverage of innovative musicians and bands