Aquidneck Island native trying to make it as musician in Nashville with song about Newport
Zoe Butler lives in Tennessee now, but she's an Aquidneck Islander down to her roots.
The 24-year-old singer, songwriter and musician was raised in Portsmouth, and her new single “Old New England Town by the Sea” is a wistful folk tune about giving it all up in order to return to a simple seaside life in Newport.
Speaking from Nashville, where she's been working as a public school teacher for the past two years, Butler talked about the musical influences in her life, her ties to Newport and her plans for the future now that she's launched her musical career.
She said her dad is a natural musician who plays a ton of instruments, and her mom, Dr. Debra Curtis, writes and teaches anthropology at Salve Regina University. Butler said her parents always enrolled her in music lessons, and she has been playing instruments, writing songs and telling stories since she was a child.
After graduating from Brown University in 2020, Butler moved to Nashville to pursue music and teach ninth-grade math at a public high school. She said balancing the demands of the classroom and her development as a musician was difficult, and pointed out the COVID pandemic was a strange time to be in a city with a huge culture and history of live music.
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She still managed to play “a bunch of solo shows and writers rounds,” and said she was influenced by “the camaraderie of the scene of women who had moved to Nashville to make alternative and indie music.” She said she fit more into the city’s alternative scene than its country heritage, and her own style is folk and Americana.
zoebutlermusic · Old New England Town By The Sea
In addition to writing her own lyrics and singing, Butler plays piano, guitar and ukulele. She explained while she hired studio musicians to back her vocals on most of the tracks, “this song about Newport is the only song on the EP with just me and my guitar. I wanted it to feel under-produced and stripped down.”
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“Old New England Town by the Sea”
“Old New England Town by the Sea” expresses both a hope in true love and an appreciation for the beauty of a simple New England life. It is available for free now on Soundcloud, and will be released on major streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music on June 29.
Depending on whether Butler lands a spot at this summer’s Newport Folk Festival, fans might be able to hear it live as well.
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If she doesn’t hear back from the Folk Festival, Butler will head to France to visit her twin sister, who runs a company making clothes for disabled women.
She’ll continue to write stories and songs and perform her music in Paris and, in the fall, she might head west to Los Angeles. She is planning to release a six-song EP called June later this year.
This article originally appeared on Newport Daily News: Zoe Butler to release 'Old New England Town by the Sea' about Newport
