Butch Walker built his reputation with hard-hitting, self-produced rock albums marked by a bright, polished sound. When he set out to make Afraid Of Ghosts, an LP partially inspired by the death of his father, he decided to forget about perfection and aim for a more visceral, acoustic feel. The songs on Afraid Of Ghosts were written over the course of a year, then recorded with Ryan Adams and his band in a four-day burst of creativity. It’s the first time Walker worked with an outside producer. Walker will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on him.
Walker: This guitar has been with me through the thickest and the thin. It’s the only guitar I ended up with when a wildfire destroyed our home and recording studio, and everything in them, many years ago. I had probably close to 40 vintage guitars, drum kits, microphones and all of my master recordings of everything I have ever done. All gone. But my wife and son were with me in NYC for an acoustic show I was playing when we got the news from back in California. So the only guitar that survived was the one I had with me. My ’62 Gibson Hummingbird. I bought this guitar way back in the day, when I could barely afford it, and my buddy John Dannert in Spartanburg, S.C., had a music store there and a venue we would play all the time. He sold me this Hummingbird for 900 bucks, which was a deal. It didn’t even have a correct pick guard or tuners on it, but I didn’t care. It looked and played and sounded incredible. I wrote almost everything I have ever written on that guitar, toured the world several times with it, dropped it, broke it a hundred times, and glued it back together. It will not die. This is the Brokeback Mountain of acoustic guitars, and it will not quit me.
