ALBUM REVIEW: Kaitlin Butts Tells Women’s Stories With Details and Depth on ‘What Else Can She Do’
Cillea Houghton
Posted On April 14, 2022
Kaitlin Butts is the poster child for strength and resiliency on her new album, What Else Can She Do. Across seven songs, the singer explores this concept by telling the story of seven different women, each on her own journey of deciphering the right decision for herself based on the challenging situation at hand. On this follow-up to her 2015 debut, Same Hell, Different Devil, Butts’ vocals capture the depth of each story to create a project that is raw and real, making for one of the best albums to come out of Nashville so far this year.
She opens the project with the gripping “it won’t always be this way,” a survivor story inspired by the tough times she and her mom experienced after her mother’s divorce from her father. The song’s title became a mantra they used to say to one another to keep hope alive, and in the lyrics Butts details the feeling of desperately gasping for a “breath of fresh air” that’s always just out of reach, casting a commanding presence over the album.
Time slows down listening to this record, as Butts gives each story room to breathe. On the title track, about a young woman who moves to the big city from her small country town, she skips the easy “happily ever after” approach, instead telling the story of a starry-eyed woman whose dreams slip out of her grasp as she resorts to a miserable life working in a diner, unable to return home or move her dreams forward. “There’s lots of sad stories / And this here’s another,” Butts sings, leaving nothing to the imagination.
The Tulsa native truly owns her power on “blood,” a gut-punching number wherein she releases the familial trauma from her past, comparing it to a “counterfeit love.” “Blood, merciless flood / Draggin’ my name through the mud / Godawful things swept under the rug / For blood,” she sings with enduring vocals.
Butts is a breath of fresh air in the Americana landscape, and with What Else Can She Do, she sets herself up to be the genre’s next breakout star, sure to astound audiences with her brilliant storytelling and a voice to match.
