For the making of his fourth album If I Were a Butterfly, Rayland Baxter holed up for over a year at a former rubber-band factory turned studio in the Kentucky countryside—a seemingly humble environment that proved to be something of a wonderland. “I spent that year living in a barn with the squirrels and the birds, on my own most of the time, and I discovered so much about music and how to create it,” says the Tennessee-bred singer/songwriter. “Instead of going into a studio with a producer for two weeks, I just waited for the record to build itself. I’d get up and go outside, see a butterfly and connect that with some impulsive thought I’d had three months ago, and suddenly a song I’d been working on would make sense. That’s how the whole album came to be.” The follow-up to 2018’s critically acclaimed Wide Awake, If I Were a Butterfly finds Baxter co-producing alongside Tim O’Sullivan (Grace Potter, The Head and the Heart) and Kai Welch (Molly Tuttle, Sierra Hull), slowly piecing together the album’s patchwork of lush psychedelia and Beatlesesque pop. In addition to working at Thunder Sound (the Kentucky studio he called home for months on end), Baxter recorded in California, Texas, Tennessee, and Washington, enlisting a remarkable lineup of musicians: Shakey Graves, Lennon Stella, several members of Cage the Elephant, Zac Cockrell of Alabama Shakes, Morning Teleportation’s Travis Goodwin, and legendary Motown drummer Miss Bobbye Hall, among many others. In an especially meaningful turn, two of the album’s tracks feature the elegant pedal steel work of his father, Bucky Baxter (a musician who performed with Bob Dylan and who passed away in May 2020). Thanks to the extraordinary care and ingenuity behind its creation, If I Were a Butterfly arrives as a work of rarefied magic, capable of stirring up immense feeling while leaving the listener happily wonderstruck. Baxter’s debut release as a producer, If I Were a Butterfly bears a dazzling unpredictability that has much to do with his limitless imagination as a collector and collagist of sound. “Sometimes the bullfrogs in the pond outside would pulse in a certain tempo and I’d apply that to a song, or I’d hear a bird chirping and it would inspire me to add harmonica in a particular place,” he says. “I could be walking around this massive building in the middle of the night and the air-conditioning would turn on, and it’d give me the idea to include a synth part that holds a similar note. I’d wait for those moments to happen and whenever I tried to force anything, the music usually rejected it.” A perfect introduction to If I Were a Butterfly’s elaborate sonic world, the album-opening title track begins with a recording of a Baxter singing at age four, then drifts into a delicately sprawling reverie ornamented with so many lovely details (lavish flute and cello melodies, radiant horns, the hypnotic harmonies of Lennon Stella and Baxter’s girlfriend, Sophia Rose). “I liked the idea of the first voice on the record being me as a little kid, not knowing where I’d be today,” notes Baxter, who embedded newly unearthed audio clips of himself and his older sister Brooke all throughout the album. Graced with the combustible guitar work of his bandmate Barney Cortez, “Billy Goat” kicks up a potent tension with its restless grooves and hot-tempered gang vocals. “It’s a breakup song about being with someone who’s on a different life path—one side wants to influence the other, and inevitably you part ways,” says Baxter. From there, the album takes on a feverish momentum with “Rubberband Man,” a delightfully frenzied track channeling a wild and giddy freedom. “There’s rubber bands all over the property at Thunder Sound—in the earth, in the concrete, used as insulation for the studio,” says Baxter. “I took a mishmash of images in my head and it turned into a song about staying flexible, rolling with the punches.” In its searching reflection on love and loss and striving for transcendence, If I Were a Butterfly reaches a quietly glorious intensity on “Tadpole”: a piano ballad threaded with childhood memories at turns oddly tender (catching frogs and crawfish in a nearby toxic creek) and nightmarish (hearing the gunshot when an across-the-street neighbor took her own life). And on “My Argentina,” If I Were a Butterfly closes out with a piano-driven and painfully raw outpouring, its starkness intermittently broken by soulful strings and gospel-esque harmonies. “One time at the studio I stayed up all night and played that song maybe 100 times; we ended up using the last take, which was recorded at about five in the morning,” says Baxter. “It’s a song that represents the thoughts one might have about a perfect love life, and I love how it ends the album in a big angelic cloud of reverb.” For Baxter, the act of self-producing such a sonically and emotionally expansive body of work proved both exhilarating and arduous. “It really wore me out to spend all that time alone at the studio, editing the hell out of this record; my heart definitely suffered,” he says. “But I also had the guidance of my dad, who was in my dreams all the time—if I was moving too fast, I’d hear him telling me to slow down.” Another profound influence on the album-making process: the 2018 deaths of Baxter’s close friends Billy Swayze (a musician whose parents owned the rubber band company that became Thunder Sound) and Tiger Merritt (the vocalist/guitarist for Morning Teleportation, who worked with Swayze in constructing the studio). “Billy and Tiger had been going up there since 2015, and finally they turned it into a legit recording studio,” he says. “It’s a very special place to me, so they’re two of the four angels I decided to dedicate this record to.” Even in its most somber moments, If I Were a Butterfly wholly fulfills Baxter’s mission of imparting a certain purposeful joy. “It’s been a weird few years, but I think the big picture is for us to just exist and find love and be loved, and try to see that all the daily bullshit is simply bugs on the windshield,” says Baxter. “I hope that this album makes people feel the way I do whenever I listen to my favorite records, and that it gives them a platform to dream on.”

With two songwriters, six albums, and more than a thousand shows under their belt, The Coffis Brothers have earned their reputation as modern-day torchbearers of all-American rock & roll. It's a sound caught halfway between amplified Americana, acoustic folk, roadhouse R&B, and electrifying roots music, crafted by a pair of California-born siblings who've been sharing the stage since childhood, and the five piece band filled out by Kyle Poppen (guitar), Aidan Collins (bass), and Cory Graves (drums). That sound reaches a new peak with Kaw-fis Bruth-urs. The band's third collaboration with Bay Area legend (and longtime Mother Hips frontman) Tim Bluhm, who serves as the album's producer, Kaw-fis Bruth-urs finds Jamie and Kellen Coffis letting their guard down, enjoying the creative ride as much as the destination itself. For every signature-sounding song like "Cut Right Through" — a heartland rock anthem built for highway drives and long horizons, as sunny as the band's Golden State homeland and as hook-driven as a Tom Petty classic — there's another track that stretches the band's sound into new territory. The result is The Coffis Brothers' widest-ranging album yet, running the gamut from bluesy, blue-eyed soul ("Face the Music") to jangling, harmony-heavy power pop (“Do You Want To").     "This is what we do, and we're giving ourselves license to evolve and get better at it, too" says Jamie, who was raised in the Santa Cruz Mountains of northern California alongside his mother — a children's musician — and his younger brother. Decades after Jamie and Kellen made their stage debut alongside their mom, singing three-part blood harmonies at a young age, their musical bond has only grown stronger, sharpened by hundreds of live shows as much as their shared DNA. "It's the natural evolution of us performing together and spending so much of our lives together," Kellen adds. "We didn't set out to make anything in one particular direction — we just wanted to make a batch of really great songs." Great songs, indeed. Looking to jumpstart their creative engines, The Coffis Brothers gave themselves a deadline, booking studio time with Bluhm before the album had even been written. "It was a different process for us," Kellen explains. "When we were coming up with new songs, we didn't have the luxury of stepping out of the room and saying, 'We'll finish it next week.' We had to keep working, and we have enough experience to know how to do that now."  "When we got into the studio, the band had never heard the songs before and we'd never played them live," Jamie adds. "It was liberating because it gave us license to do whatever we wanted. For years, we'd grown really attached to the traditional format of a three-minute song. All of a sudden, we were asking ourselves, 'Well, what if we don't do that?' We still love sounding like us, but we can pursue other ideas if that's where the muse takes us." Another new addition was The Mother Hips' drummer, John Hofer, who joined the band in the recording studio. His loose, limber feel become a big part of the album's DNA, influencing the tempo shifts in songs like "I Ain't Worthy" — whose driving verses give way to cathartic, half-time choruses — and "Face the Music," which comes to a close with an incendiary instrumental outro. Also playing integral roles in Kaw-fis Bruth-urs' creation were members of The Coffis Brothers' touring band, resulting in a mix familiar faces and new blood, of in-the-moment ideas and brotherly instincts, of studio creativity and road-warrior chemistry. The musicians recorded the bulk of each song in the same room, playing together in real time, reacting to one another's contributions as each take unfolded. "So many of the records we love were made that way," Jamie points out. "We wanted to capture the sound of a band hanging out in the studio, having fun, being in the moment." Being in the moment didn't stop Jamie and Kellen from taking a look backward with songs like "Family" and "Home," both of which find the brothers ruminating on friendship, family, and the long journey that's brought them to the present. Nostalgia isn't something the brothers usually indulge in — they'd rather focus upon the road ahead — but it's refreshing to hear The Coffis Brothers nod to their shared roots. At the same time, Kaw-fis Bruth-urs defiantly moves the group forward, doubling down on The Coffis Brothers' harmony-drenched rock & roll sound while showcasing just how eclectic that music can be.  "We're in a space now where we feel comfortable stretching ourselves, and that's allowed us to make these songs that we just weren't able to do on past albums," Kellen says. "I don't feel like we're repeating ourselves, or doing something we've already done, but it still sounds like us." As for the album's phonetically spelled title… well, that's another thing that might not have appeared on previous records. "It's a tongue-in-cheek way of saying, 'This is us, and we're coming to a new realization of who we are as musicians,'" Jamie says. "If we'd come up with that idea a few years ago, we might've dismissed it as being too much of a joke. Maybe we took ourselves too seriously at the beginning, but now we're alright with bringing our guard down a little bit. We can laugh at ourselves. We're having fun, even if this is still serious business."