Music Review: Zoe Butler, ‘June’
The singer-songwriter brings beauty to devastation in an intriguing Americana blend on her debut EP.
Zoe Butler June album artwork.
When Zoe Butler writes about pain, she knows what she’s talking about. In May 2022, she told Adobe and Teardrops about the events that inspired many of the songs on her new EP. But you don’t have to know her tragic backstory to know her music is coming from a real place.
On June, her six-song debut EP that came out last week, Butler (who divides her time between Nashville and Paris) takes us to the East Coast to travel a landscape of young love, hopes and dreams, bereavement and despair.
Although all six tracks are slow and melancholy, they employ a variety of Americana styles that keeps the sound fresh, each one delivering a subtle surprise as it comes in. All are anchored by Butler’s achingly beautiful delivery; like great torch song chanteuses of all genres, from Patsy Cline to Edith Piaf, she can express heartache that you’d feel regardless of the lyrics.
Opening with simple piano chords (which are eventually joined by drums and yearning strings), “Shenandoah Blues” starts with an image of a church in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the lyrics (with the refrain “If Virginia is for lovers, then why’d you leave me here?”) could be about a funeral, a wedding that didn’t happen, or just praying for someone who’s gone, until you get to the part about “standing over your plot.” Relistening with that in mind, it becomes a song of regret about things left unsaid and trying to move on from the unfinished feeling of being suddenly separated from a loved one by death.
“Gas Station Coffee” is a classic broken-hearted ballad with more of a pop feel in both its melody and arrangement than the first track despite the waltz tempo. Evocative lyrics set the stage of being on the road while being tormented by a failed relationship. The words have a way of twisting to slightly unexpected places, vividly portraying one of those bad-for-everyone relationships that can be so hard to leave: “You like that I’m broken because it turns you on”; “I tried getting high to outrun the pain / But as high as I got, still saw your name from space.”
Zoe Butler. Photo courtesy of the artist.
A more wistful relationship-ending song with a radio-ready contemporary country feel, “Hitchhiker’s Guide” is about the feeling of a summer fling ending as the lovers go their separate ways: “Your sunburns are fading, your words are falling flat.” Even an imagined future reunion feels like it’d be fleeting: “we’ll make out in your backseat / I can’t afford a hotel room on a lover’s salary.”
The next track, “Old New England Town by the Sea,” dives into a vivid fantasy of leaving everything else behind to have “a simple life” with a lover. With a more upbeat arrangement it might be an optimistic, heartwarming song—there’s nothing in the lyrics to suggest it can’t come true—but set to a mournful melody and a spare, simple acoustic guitar, it feels like an impossible, fruitless dream.
“Last I Heard” picks up the tempo but doesn’t dial down the heartbreak, portraying another lost relationship: “Last I heard he was on a bridge and his friends all said I was water under it.” With ominous references to a “last syringe” and “a night I don’t remember,” it’s one of those songs that sparks the imagination, suggesting a different possible story every time you hear it.
June closes with the title track, and it’s the most explicitly clear song about one of the main throughlines of the EP, which is Butler trying to process the death of her high-school boyfriend. The song uses Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash’s love as a jumping-off point to try to express a loss so hard you feel like you might not recover from it. “Until I met you I wouldn't have believed that Johnny died of heartbreak / But since you've been gone I’ve been thinking that it might be my fate too.”
Zoe Butler, live in London. Photo courtesy of the artist.
For those times when you need sad songs to help you process your own emotions, this record is the perfect remedy. By simply expressing her own grief and love, Butler creates the kind of universal songs of longing and loss that anyone can relate to, no matter the scale or exact circumstances of their own pain.
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the primary music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym T.A. Berkeley!
