SPOTLIGHT: Tré Burt Steers Away From Distraction With ‘Traffic Fiction’ [VIDEO]

EDITOR’S NOTE: Tré Burt is No Depression’s Spotlight artist for October. Read more about him and his new album, Traffic Fiction, in our interview, and look for more all month long.

Too much pressure can be poison for the creative process. Artists need time and space and freedom to do their work. But sometimes a little nudge can’t hurt.

Tré Burt got that nudge last year in the form of a phone call from his record label, John Prine-founded Oh Boy Records. Eager to keep things rolling after the successful release of Burt’s 2021 album, You, Yeah, You, the label was wondering what he had in mind for his follow-up.

Truth was, nothing much. But Burt, in the midst of a tour in Canada, hung up the phone, made his way to a pub in Calgary, put aside everything that had been holding him back, and got to work. The result was a poem that would become “Traffic Fiction,” the title track for his new album and a summation of its themes of extraneous things that get in the way of our true lives and callings.

“Traffic fiction,” Burt says in his Spotlight interview, refers to “all the absurdity happening in the world today and the fake problems us humans create for ourselves and subjugate each other to out of spite, greed, boredom, pain, confusion, and ignorance. Or worse.”

On the album, the song is a soul-flavored bop with organ swells, backing “ooooohs,” and a call-and-response chorus. But in this video for No Depression readers, Burt offers a “quiet, acoustic version” of “Traffic Fiction” that drives right to the heart of the message.