SPOTLIGHT: Tré Burt Dances Through Darkness on ‘Traffic Fiction’

EDITOR’S NOTE: Tré Burt is No Depression’s Spotlight artist for October 2023. His new album, Traffic Fiction, is out Oct. 6 on Oh Boy Records. Look for more about Burt and Traffic Fiction all month long.

A few weeks before the release of his third album, Traffic Fiction, Tré Burt was somewhere he usually isn’t: sitting on the front porch of the house he rents in East Nashville. He’d just returned home after a summer of festival dates, most recently opening shows for Wilco across Europe. In the summer of 2021 he moved to Nashville, a place that he equates to living at the X-Men mansion.

“That’s what it’s like living in Nashville. Everyone’s got their little powers and I just love going and looking at them and learning,” he explains. “That’s why I go to a lot of shows. I want to feel like what I’m doing is inadequate. I chase that feeling. That’s when I really start trying.”

Burt is a folk singer who first learned to perform while busking on the streets of San Francisco and Sacramento, his hometown. In the decade-plus since, he’s released a pair of studio albums, written a few of our preeminent modern protest songs, and toured alone and with Shakey Graves, Shovels and Rope, and Nathaniel Rateliff, playing shows across the US and Europe.

Burt describes this last year, as he entered his 30s, as the hardest one of his life. Personally there was constant touring, breakups, and struggles with mental health. Around him was the bleakness of post-pandemic life and the ongoing threat of a world war. One day in 2022, while he was on tour in Calgary, he got a call from Oh Boy Records, who’d re-released Burt’s debut Caught It From the Rye in 2020 and put out his follow-up, You, Yeah, You, in 2021. They were calling to hear his ideas for the next album, and he told them that he didn’t really have anything started yet.

“I think I had a lot going on for me at that time,” Burt recalls. “I wasn’t really quite ready to think about the record, so that night after that phone call, I felt kind of bad, so I just went to the pub and started writing this poem.”

That poem became Traffic Fiction’s title track and gave the album its spiritual and musical direction. To him, the words “traffic fiction” describe “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.”

A few months after he’d written “Traffic Fiction,” he returned to Canada a few days before a festival appearance and rented a house on Big Rideau Lake in Ontario. “I thought it’d just be great to go next to a body of water in the woods and just rent a bunch of equipment and then see what pours out,” he says. “I got to slow down a lot and zoom into what I really wanted this record to sound like.”

This was a process that had worked for Burt before: he’d holed up for a few days in Yosemite National Park while writing songs for You, Yeah, You. He says it usually takes some time before he’s able to get at the songs, or rather let the songs get to him.

“I gotta whip myself into a kind of state of hypnosis to get to the  goo, where I can just let myself be open to musical ideas,” he explains. “If I’m really gonna go down there into the caves, I’ve got to get my little routine, which is basically just pacing around the property on lots of walks and lots of tea.”

Before he got to the cabin, he’d gone to a Long & McQuade music store and walked out with a van full of instruments, including several guitars, a bass, keyboard, and even a clarinet. Burt used the instruments, particularly the keyboard, as departures into the songwriting process. “If you call yourself a guitar player, which I don’t really, but if you put your identity behind one thing, it can be really frustrating when you can’t think of any sounds or anything you want to do,” he explains. “So having a mindless instrument around when you’re writing, like a clarinet just to blow on, is really helpful.”

For nine days, he walked the water’s edge and wrote and recorded demos of everything he worked on. When the tour was over, he returned home to Nashville and took the demos to Andrija Tokic at The Bomb Shelter studio. Burt says Tokic immediately understood what he was after, an album Burt considered his “future doo-wop record.”

With Tokic and a few of Burt’s Nashville friends and neighbors, Traffic Fiction came together over the course of the next few months. The result is a folk soul album searching for and finding jubilance amid a cruel and ever-darkening world. “I call it a kind of ‘romance at the start of the apocalypse’ record. … The record has kind of got this apocalyptic nature,” Burt says. “It really is about dancing through it and saying, ‘Fuck it, I don’t care. ‘I’m gonna be in my body and take all the joy I can. I’m not gonna let anybody put that light out.’”

Earlier this year, as Burt was putting the finishing touches on Traffic Fiction, his grandfather passed away after a years-long battle with dementia. “My Pops meant the world to me,” Burt says. “He was my father figure in my life and kind of shapes my character of who I am today.” The album was already in some ways about his grandfather, pulling sonically from the music Burt first found in his grandfather’s record collection: Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, The Delfonics, and The Temptations. (Burt put together a playlist of some of the songs that inspired Traffic Fiction.) Later, these sacred songs were the soundtrack that Burt and his father would listen to while they were riding down Sacramento’s Sunrise Boulevard on the way to their jobs at the Capital Nursery Company. “That was the music we listened to on the way back and forth to work. And we didn’t say nothing. We didn’t speak to each other because we didn’t feel like we had to. We were just connecting through this sound in that space, which felt like a spaceship back then.”

After his grandfather’s passing, Burt decided to add his voice onto the album via three audio clips that Burt recorded during his last visits. In one, Burt shows his grandfather his debit card, etched with Burt’s LLC, a name he’d taken from his grandfather’s business: BNB MAINTENANCE.

“That was something he always loved,” Burt recalls. “I would show him my debit card and say ‘Do you know what this is?’ I did that a thousand times and he always got a kick out of it. But that time was maybe the last time he kind of recognized it. Maybe, maybe not.” That interaction closes out the record, implying that the family name, and the music that Burt’s grandfather passed down, both carry on.

Burt says the musically adventurous and genre-bending Traffic Fiction presents a fuller portrait of him as an artist than his previous albums did. “There’s this whole universe and my job as an artist is to explore that whole map and not just stay on the same planet,” he says. There’s a clear throughline on the album from the radio-ready pop of “Santiago” to the Sunny & The Sunliners-indebted “Wings for a Butterfly.” But this isn’t the Tré Burt of the past or even of the future: It’s the Tré Burt of the current moment. “Same tree, different branch,” he says. “It’s where I want me, you know?”

His sonic exploration is perhaps most felt within the burning menace of “Kids in tha Yard,” the last song that Burt wrote for the album. He was back in Nashville, finishing the record, when he “felt one coming on.” He points to the first verse’s opening line as his current life credo: celebrating personal and artistic freedom, couched as it always is beneath our ruling capitalist structures.

 I do what I want
When I’m paying the rent
I’ll never be free
But I can pretend

“At this point,” he says, “whatever I’m doing, I call it my career. I don’t really care about appeasing what anybody’s expecting. It’s always gonna be a little off or whatever. So I’m just doing what I want.”