Catching up with Sacramento-based musician Tré Burt during a time of loss and unrest
Early in 2020, Sacramento-based singer/songwriter Tré Burt was preparing for an international tour to promote his rootsy debut album of what he calls “anti-love songs” titled “Caught it from the Rye.” Burt is one of only two new artists to be signed to John Prine’s Oh Boy Records in the past 15 years, and was slated to open for the country legend, whom he counts in his top three favorite artists of all time.
But by April, devastating news of the novel coronavirus swept the nation, Burt’s tour was canceled, and John Prine succumbed to complications from COVID-19, another victim of a pandemic whose spread continues to care not for our best-laid plans.
Burt caught up with The Sacramento Bee about his musical past, what it’s been like for him since his tour was sidelined, as well as his views on the importance of folk music tradition during times of unrest.
So, “Caught it from the Rye” was re-released by Oh Boy Records in January. You released the album on your own for the first time in September of 2018?
Yeah, it was a little project I did. I didn’t have any expectations for what it would be. It felt like a fleeting moment.
Was the album comprised of years of material?
I wrote a lot of songs before I wrote that record and only one of the songs survived the years, which was “Caught it from the Rye.” The other ones I wrote the year before when I was living in Australia before I released the record the first time around.
Tell me a bit about the trajectory that brought you back to Sacramento after moving around.
My parents divorced when I was 4. My dad lived in the Bay. Every two weeks I’d hop over to my dad’s house. But I grew up in Citrus Heights more or less. I went to Northridge Elementary School.
You ended up in the Bay Area for a bit?
I went to college at SF State for a year. But I spent most of my time going to the Bart station and busking and setting up shows. I played at the Parkside and the Depot, SF State’s excuse for a music venue. Mostly though, I loved busking.
After San Francisco where did you go?
Well, I went up to Portland because a lady gave me a thousand dollars as a tip. I don’t know what sane person would do that. Her name was Monique Compton. It was really windy that day, and I was busking in front of her optometry shop, which is since long gone.
She must have really liked your music.
Well yeah, it was enough for me to keep doing it. I was trying to get enough money to take this girl out on a date. I don’t know why I asked her out when I had no money at all, so I wanted to make it a game and go busk to see what kind of date it would be.
How was the date?
The date was modest but a good time. We went to the movies in South San Francisco. I got the extra-large popcorn.
So what did you do with the rest?
Yeah, so I took the money and I booked a tour leading up to Portland as my final stop. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just found places on Craigslist and emailed them. The tour was very humble, there was a couple pizza shops, a couple venues.
Then my car broke down once we got to Portland. I was with my friend Henry who played drums for me on the tour. He had to find other means back home because he didn’t feel like sleeping in a car in Portland indefinitely with a grown man. I don’t get why.
I ended up staying. I got a job, I fixed my car, I got a room and five years go by.
Where did you go from there?
From there I met a girl who I fell in love with and went to Australia with her. It was serendipity, you know. She was friends with one of my roommates. We met, fell in love, and she’s like “I gotta go back to Australia, you wanna come?” and I was like, alright. Why not? I was there for two years.
I wonder how many people per year Australia pulls in that way on average. You’re not the only person I know who moved there for that exact reason.
Right? High tens I’d say. They got a good business going.
So, Australia is where you ended up writing the bulk of your album?
Yeah, that’s where I felt liquid enough to write without an ego. I just started hashing things out.
What do you mean when you say, write without and ego?
When you’re first starting to write you get self-conscious, you’re trying to sound like other people, you’re second-guessing what you do. You’re in your head a lot.
In Australia, maybe it was the heat, but I just had no time to think about myself, my insecurities. I got in this groove where I allowed myself to create without that little goalkeeper in your head blocking your shots. So, I ended up writing most of the record there.
What made you come back to Sacramento, in particular?
I missed it. That was 2016. It was when Philando Castile was murdered, and there was an unrest in this country that I felt like I needed to be a part of alongside my community. It felt like some sort of moral responsibility.
That, and also, I had not spent any of my adult life in Sacramento at that point, so I wanted to give it a fair try. Because there’s something so lovable about Sacramento. And I always knew it, but I was more interested in going other places. It’s never the place you’re from you find most interesting, it’s always somewhere else.
On the topic of coming home, it’s interesting you were compelled to do so in 2016, I would say that was a pivotal year politically and culturally. Folk music has been used as a tool of protest, during the 60s and 70s for example, to express dissent and subvert the status quo. Would you consider yourself a folk musician and is that part of the reason you came home?
I’d say I take a lot of my tips, that I’m informed a lot by folk tradition, by the culture of folk music and part of the moral responsibility of a folk artist is to record the times we live in.
I’d say folk music, way before the 60s and 70s, in the sharecropping days, had blues musicians who played guitar on the porch in between working the fields. You hear tropes like “my woman treats me so unkind, she left me to die.” That was code talk that slaves used to sing about their masters, often singing about a “woman.”
So, in that form, protest music has been around for a couple centuries or more. But the 60s is where it really started to get a platform because the record industry found out it could be profitable, which is a dark part of the music industry but it’s true.
So, has making music in the current political climate, with the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests against police brutality affected the way you’re making music going forward?
You know, I hate writing protest songs. They’re always, for me, very directly tied into my experience. It’s kind of painful, but cathartic. It’s important that people are aware that musicians and the tradition of folk music is still alive and well, and people are paying attention. These are things that people deeply care about and want to preserve the spirit of.
So yeah, unfortunately, these times have heavily affected what I’m writing now.
To go back a little bit, can you tell me about getting signed to Oh Boy Records, John Prine’s record label, and the re-release of Caught it from the Rye?
Yeah, so John’s son (Jody Whelan) heard my record in the summer of 2019 and really liked it. At that time, I didn’t know who Jody was, and his message to me got stuck in my spam box. When I finally found it and read it, I was like, man, you guys can totally re-release this because nobody, I don’t think, even knows I released it. Maybe five months later we had a deal.
You were slated to go on tour for your album this summer and do some opening gigs for John Prine, all of which was derailed by the pandemic and Prine’s passing due to COVID-19 complications. Can you tell me what that was like for you?
Well, it was an eye-opener. It was also like whiplash. So much happened in that time period around John’s passing, with coronavirus and more unrest. It’s like I couldn’t even focus on how I felt so much was happening. I felt like a wet noodle flapping in the wind. I’m still learning how it affects me.
The record label is only four people, and they’re all very close to John so their daily routines centered around taking care of him. When John went, it was like everybody was paralyzed. Oh Boy Records was his creation. He’s the father of that idea, he started it in ’85. Now, I feel closer to the record label in some way. I’m still working that out.
How have you been able to cope since your tour was put on hold? Have you been using the time to create rather than promote?
I spent a lot of time at the protests. It’s been really heavy. People are tired and fed up. It’s been really powerful to be in chorus with them. It’s so dumb how we just keep going through this cycle. Something bad happens, we’re out there on the streets for weeks, and then it happens every few years. We want this to be the last time we’re out here on the streets.
After that I took some time to go up to a cabin in Yosemite for week, to get in touch with how I’m feeling, I guess. To see how I felt. Up there I wrote a lot of songs, which will be on the next record coming out.
So that’s what you’re working on now?
Yeah, so tomorrow I’m recording a protest song that we all decided should come out now and not wait for the next record. It’s going to come out mid-August, I think.
How do you plan to release new music?
That’s the question, right? It’s tricky, how do you release music in this climate? What I’ve found is that there’s no right answer. The pandemic took away our ability to tour, to play live music. It’s really equalized the grounds on how everybody releases music, but there’s no tried and true method.
The bigger question is, how do you record music? You can’t really be around other people. The next record is going to need a band, so it will require people to record parts from their homes and send it over and we’ll piece it together like a mosaic.
What’s the name of the new single coming in August?
“Under the Devil’s Knee,” it’s not even a song really. It’s a replaying of events that happened.
Do you have a background in writing or poetry?
No, I don’t outside of my amateur journaling. In school I always loved creative writing. I always felt free doing that, because you can create any world you want to or turn something into something else. I was always interested in that, in playing with words in that way. It gave me power over reality. I always loved writing and reading other peoples’ writing as well.
I noticed you have someone else running your social media accounts and you don’t have a smart phone, why is that?
Yeah, I’m locked out of my social media right now. I have Facebook and Instagram but someone else runs it. It’s just sensory overload. It can be very distracting and addicting to have the whole world in your pocket. It can be very frustrating too, seeing all those trolls. It makes you feel bad, seeing all that stuff, waking up, it’s the first thing you do. So, what I did was get rid of my smart phone and I ordered one of those old Nokias.
I was a flip phone hold-out for the longest time, I’m kind of jealous.
You gotta come back and join us. It’s a double-edged sword. [Social media] is a great tool for engaging people en masse, you know, to spread ideas, to organize. There’s a lot of benefits to it. But the gas is the evil-spiritedness that people show on the internet, that outweighs it for me.
People are much crueler online than they would be in person.
Right. I get what I need best from talking to people in person, but that’s hard these days. But now is a good time to spend getting to know how local government works, who your city officials are and learn about your community. I think people should take advantage of that.
