SPOTLIGHT: Kaitlin Butts on the Little and Big Steps That Led to Life as a Roadrunner

EDITOR’S NOTE: Kaitlin Butts is No Depression’s Spotlight artist for June 2024. Read more about her and her new album, Roadrunner! (out June 28 via Soundly Music), in our interview, and look for more all month long.

As I sit on a flight to my cousin’s wedding, I’m realizing how little I get to do this kind of thing. Being on the road as often as I am can strip you of reality and make you forget something as common as wedding season, because in my world, it’s festival season. As if to drive that point home, my husband, Cleto, and I ran into one of our fellow travelers, Hayes Carll, in airport security and realized we were on our way to the same gate for this flight to Oklahoma City.

I’m already feeling nostalgic knowing Cleto and I are about to spend the night in Bricktown, OKC, my old stomping grounds. I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around how far I’ve come since I lived there, what little and big steps have happened, and everything that had to go wrong or go right that led me to where I am, trying to play it cool, casually talking to Hayes Carll as a peer at an airport gate.

I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and at the age of 4 started taking musical theater, ballet, tap, jazz, and acting classes at Theatre Arts in Broken Arrow. This was after a gymnastics teacher told my mom that I wasn’t very interested in gymnastics but was very fond of singing and dancing in front of the large mirrors, and that she thought I would really enjoy musical theater instead.

She wasn’t wrong. I would spend my days after school, from about 3 to 9 p.m., at Theatre Arts, partaking in as many classes as they had available to me. I loved it. I loved singing, dancing, learning, performing, being on stage, the costumes, the rehearsal, the feeling of my mom slicking my hair back in a ballet bun, and the smell of her Maybelline lipstick, rosy-pink blush, and mascara that was reserved only for recitals and performances.

Looking back on my performances, there was always a cowboy or country music theme to them. I was Mary Rogers in a production of The Will Rogers Follies with my fake lasso and chaps. At recitals I would sing songs like “You Can’t Get a Man With a Gun” from Annie Get Your Gun or “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” in full cowgirl getup. I would do tap dances to “Get Rhythm” by Johnny Cash or “Let ’Er Rip” by The Chicks. It’s funny to look back now and see that country music was always a part of my life, long before I knew I would grow up to be a country singer.

When I was about 15, my neighbor had been getting guitar lessons. I had taken a guitar lesson before with a teacher that went straight into music theory and I found myself bored and completely uninterested. My mom had a sidebar conversation with my new guitar teacher before my first lesson and told him I might need a different approach and quick-reward type of lesson if he wanted to get me hooked. He came in and asked me about the music I listened to and if I could learn any song today, what would it be? I quickly responded “Kerosene” by Miranda Lambert. By the end of the lesson, I was able to play that iconic intro lick and strum and sing along to one of my favorite songs. And from the chords I learned at that lesson, he told me my homework was to find songs that used the same chords and to try to learn how to play them too. I was hooked.

I used to have a 3-inch binder full of printed out and laminated chord sheets from UltimateGuitar.com that I would flip through, singing every song I knew at family gatherings, on my living room floor, or alone in my bedroom. I was 16 when I went to my first open mic at The Hunt Club in downtown Tulsa. My friends Bijan, Nathan, and Hunter tagged along to cheer me on as I sang “The Way I Am” by Merle Haggard.

When it came time to decide where I wanted to go to college, I began to follow the norm. I started looking into sororities, going to rush, enrolling at Oklahoma State University, even going so far as finding a roommate, but I got a nudge that shifted my sails. I got a small (and I mean small) scholarship to The Academy of Contemporary Music (ACM) at the University of Central Oklahoma, or as some folks call it, “The School of Rock.” I dropped everything at OSU and the security of what a “normal” college experience might look like for a school that wasn’t like the others.

In Oklahoma City, I spent my time going to school and playing gigs anywhere they would let me. I would play 3-hour gigs for $75 and dinner at Picasso’s on Paseo, Wormy Dog Saloon, and JJ’s Alley and play every cover song I knew while throwing in an original every now and then.

From there, I enrolled in a program through ACM’s Derek Brown that helped students get gigs. I was offered a slot at the Gypsy Cafe Music Festival in Stillwater, where I met Mike McClure, who ended up being the producer of my first album, Same Hell, Different Devil. Mike’s drummer, Walt McMurry, did some radio promotion work, so I sent him some CDs that he distributed down in Texas.

One recipient was Shayne Hollinger at 95.9 The Ranch in Fort Worth. A few months later, a band named Flatland Cavalry would hear my song “Gal Like Me” on that radio station and call me to feature on their song “A Life Where We Work Out.” In the studio singing that song, I would meet Cleto, who became my husband in October 2020. The song went certified gold, and the plaque marking that milestone is now waiting to be hung in our first house that we just bought together in Nashville.

Looking ahead, I’m going on my first headlining tour, plus festival dates in Spain and the UK, and I even get to play Lollapalooza this year. I’m releasing my third album, Roadrunner!, which has a Vince Gill feature on it (what?!?). All while being married to another frontman of another band, who understands and loves this lifestyle and job just as much as I do. It’s hard to look around me and not feel giddy about what my life has become and how I got to be here.

All of these opportunities or nudges have not been coincidental, and none of my decisions impulsive. They have been gut feelings or split-second decisions that kept me on track and led me exactly to where I am now. Had it not been for that gymnastics teacher, that little scholarship, or that radio promoter, I don’t know where I’d be, but I’d like to think that life would have adjusted its sails so that I would end up here either way.