HEY YOU

Tré Burt’s new album is released on John Prine’s Oh Boy! label - a testament to his talent.

By Denise Hylands

Just a year after his full-length debut was re-released by John Prine’s Oh Boy! label Sacramento singer-songwriter Tré Burt has released his second full-length album. You, Yeah, You was recorded in Durham, North Carolina with producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee, War on Drugs) and features contributions from Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath, Phil Cook, and Kelsey Waldon. Burt’s 2020 protest anthem, ‘Under The Devil’s Knee’ featuring Allison Russell, Sunny War and Leyla McCalla, was written in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Eric Garner. It caught the attention of scholars and activists such as Dr. Cornel West and garnered an invitation to speak on a panel with the latter two at Harvard’s Kennedy School through Dr. Muhammad’s Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project. Burt’s humble roots involved working menial day jobs; as a maintenance technician, servicing airplanes at SFO International, taping boxes as a UPS worker. His literary songwriting and lo-fi, rootsy aesthetic, was honed busking on the streets of San Francisco and traveling the world in search of inspiration. In fact, he spent some time in Australia, living and busking in Melbourne for several years. “I lived there for two years, in Preston. From 2015 to 2017,” recalls Burt. “I was busking in front of Woolworths and I played all over, I guess. I love it there. I want to come back.” “I dropped out of college the first year I went to San Francisco state,” he continues when I ask him about his early years, “and I figured the streets were the classroom and I just kind of went driving and busking and meeting people and playing where I could. Pizza shops, cafes, street corners, train stations. Went to Australia, came back. But they were also fun times and I wouldn’t trade them for anything. Put some grit underneath my nails.” Burt’s ‘60’s style folk and singing has inevitably been compared to Bob Dylan. “Obviously a fan, so much so you snuck into a concert to see him once,” says Burt. “Yeah. I was living in my car in Portland, and it was a rainy day. I was reading the newspaper, sure enough, Bob Dylan was playing not too far from where I was parked. I was very broke, couldn’t buy a ticket if I wanted to. It’s probably sold out. I went to the venue and there’s a security guard who I watched for about 30, 45 minutes, their routine. Every five minutes they’d light a cigarette and every time they’d go to the bathroom. When they were gone, this little girl and her grandma were walking towards the door, so I just tapped on the window and asked if she’d let me in and sure enough, she did. I kind of just pushed my way through and they just let me walk to the front. I got to the front and Dylan was in the middle of a harmonica solo, and he kind of looks down and to see what all the ruckus is, and we just kind of locked eyes for a second. I’m just starstruck. “I think he was just kind of surprised to see this scrappy looking black kid in an ocean of old white deadheads.” Tre self-released his first album, Caught It From The Rye, in 2018 which later was picked up by Oh Boy! Records. “Well, Jody Whelan, John’s son, reached out and said he liked my record,” explains Burt. “It came up in my other inbox on Instagram, and I didn’t check it for a couple of weeks. Finally, I saw I had a message from Jody Whelan saying he likes my record. I said, ‘Thank you. That’s a huge honour, John Prine is one of my biggest influences.’ And I asked him if he’d like to re-release it. And he said, ‘Yeah, actually I do.’ It’s bizarre.” “I feel their love and support and I got to meet John and play for him,” says Burt when I mention that he has joined the Prine family. “So, yeah, I’m blessed.” You, Yeah, You then emerged from some low times for Burt and was written in a little cabin in North Forks, California, that Burt escaped to for a while as he dealt with Prine’s death and in the midst of the pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests and wild fires. “It’s hard to separate, I guess, this record from last year,” he says. “I felt like I had a lot bottled up and I didn’t know how to get it out. I didn’t particularly feel like writing. But Sacramento was on fire literally and figuratively, protests and the smoke from the forest fires and the pandemic, and I just had to get away. I went up there and got to talk to myself for the first time in a long time. Dealing with the loss of John and police murders and the world. “Brad Cook’s a kind of a genius figure who I was listening to when I was in high school,” says Burt of his producer. “Different capacities, his work with ‘Megafaun’, his band or with Bon Iver. I loved the records he produced. When he said that he wanted to produce this record, I instantly was thrilled to meet them. But then again, I’ve never had a producer before so I was pretty nervous giving someone else that much control. I went to North Carolina where he lives, and we spent a day just talking and getting to know each other. It was definitely a relationship that built a pretty special one that led us to the finished product of this album. Our relationship is very much involved in the creating of that record, which I wasn’t expecting.” “I guess it’s a little violating at first. I’m not a very precious person,” he continues, “but I do have a way I wanted the song to sound, so I was a little nervous. But through me and Brad hanging out and talking and I guess, bonding, we ended up getting on the same page of how we wanted the record to sound and that was pretty minimal. He just

wanted to let my voice and guitar playing be the highlight, I guess. Be on spotlight. His brother Phil Cook plays on it, Matt McCaughan from Bon Iver plays drums on it. Amelia Meath from Sylvan Esso sings, and my label mate, Kelsey Waldon. All of us together, they’re just such a genius set of people and I’m just glad they cared about the songs enough to be part of it.” Kelsey Waldon features on the song ‘Dixie Red’ which is dedicated to John Prine “Well, Dixie Red is a type of peach that grows south of the Mason–Dixon,” explains Burt, “and John’s from Chicago but spent a lot of his time in the south. I thought it’d be fitting to take this peach, which he uses in a song called ‘Spanish Pipedream’ and use that as kind of symbolism for his body of work. Burt has said that his ultimate ambition was to write 50 albums, front the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival and buy some land. Two albums down, only got 48 to go. “Well, I have one that I recorded in Preston actually,” he notes. It’s Takes From the Dungeon, phone memo demos. I recorded that in a little granny flat on my cell phone. I’ll count that as a record. I was supposed to play Hardly Strictly this year, but unfortunately, I’m on the road, so I couldn’t. I’m constantly on the prowl.”

You, Yeah, You is available now via Thirty Tigers/Cooking Vinyl Australia.

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“Some of the most insightful, poignant and heartfelt songs you'll hear this or any other year” - Stuart Coupe