Kaitlin Butts has a question. “Have you ever heard ‘Rockstar’ by Nickelback ?” she asks between bites of a chicken taco at one of her favorite Mexican restaurants in East Nashville. She’s trying to explain the vocal sound she was going for on her song
“The Bartender.” Specifically, the part of the arguably cringey 2005 hit where ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons delivers the bizarre line, “I’ll have the quesadilla.”
“You know, that low beefy voice,” Butts says, who eventually recruited Brothers Osborne‘s TJ Osborne and his deep baritone for the rollicking track off her new album, Hello, Honky Tonk. “Of course, the most masculine voice on the album is the most gay man in country music. And that makes me feel so satisfied.”
We’re having an early lunch before Butts heads to New York, and the Oklahoma native arrived in a giant sweatshirt toting an also giant bottle of greenish water that apparently contains chlorophyll (good for the skin, she says), which she pours into her limeade glass when finished. Butts laughs thinking about how, when she brought the idea — and reference point — for “The Bartender” to her producer Tofer Brown, it was the first time he’d ever had an artist ask for Nickelback vibes in a studio session.
In Butts’ universe, though, nothing is ever too much of a shock. As a former theater kid,and one of country’s most imaginative creative minds, she’s always had as much of a flair for the dramatic as she does humor and quirk. Like her 2024 breakthrough Roadrunner, which was inspired by the musical Oklahoma!, Hello, Honky Tonk loosely nods to Chicago — except instead of taking us to the Jazz Age, Butts tells the story of the characters that mull around her favorite honky-tonks as a proxy for the slings and arrows of all human experience. The bartenders, the lovers, the regulars, the woman who just needs to let loose. Welcoming us into the world is Lainey Wilson, who opens the record with a spoken-word introduction to “Katie B’s Honky Tonk Saloon” in her instantly recognizable drawl. Centered in Butts’ powerhouse voice, vivid songwriting, and fluid pool of influences (see: Nickelback), it all comes together in an idiosyncratic album where every detail is considered but nothing feels overwrought.
After years on the road playing those very honky-tonks, Butts is finally reaching the kind of audience she’s always dreamed of — albeit, not exactly in ways she might have predicted. Last year, her song “You Don’t Have to Die (To Be Dead to Me)” from Roadrunner went viral on TikTok with help from Avery Anna and Ella Langley. Suddenly, labels that had given her the cold shoulder were calling her manager to demand meetings. She spent 2026 opening for Wilson and Langley, played CMA Fest, snagged a role in the music video for “Choosin’ Texas,” and signed a deal with Republic Records. It wasn’t long ago that she was wondering if she could even keep up with the relentless grind of always bubbling just beneath the surface.
“There was one show in New Mexico where me and my band were like, if it’s going to be like this for too many more years, we can’t do this anymore,” Butts says, remembering the letdown of a small crowd after endless exhausting nights on the road. “I’ve been grinding, I’ve been paying my dues, I’ve been sitting on these little stages with rinky-dink lights. To have the whole thing turn around in a year, it was insane.”
Butts gives hefty credit to Langley, who sent “You Ain’t Gotta Die (To Be Dead to Me)” skyrocketing after making her own TikTok with the song while stirring a pot in her kitchen. “Ella did hers, and it totally changed my life,” Butts says, who remembers a time on tour opening for Wyatt Flores when she saw it all click in the audience. “Suddenly, you could see people being like, ‘Oh, that’s the girl from the internet!’”
It was resonating with fans, but not everyone (or every label she met with) understood her vision, where she melds her love of country and Red Dirt music with everything from Kesha and Chappell Roan to musical theater, making sure to be as inclusive and welcoming as possible in a genre that far too often centers the straight white male experience. “My goal isn’t necessarily to be on country radio,” Butts says. “I feel like my music can be in a lot of different rooms. My goal is to be likeBrandi Carlile, who has this huge sea of an audience, where she can be a chameleon almost.”
Butts works to accomplish this by instantly letting people know exactly who she is — and not wavering. There was no better place to see this on display than last summer, when she took the stage at Nissan Stadium in Nashville for CMA Fest to play to one of her biggest audiences yet, stepping out with her acoustic guitar, ruffled black shorts and letting the words “big tits” roll off her lips in the first verse (was that the first “tits” ever said at a CMA Fest stadium show? Perhaps). It’s the opening line of “Never Really Mine,” a song written with Lola Kirkeand Maggie Antone that was the debut single from Hello, Honky Tonk. For the newer fans, it’s the kind of track that gives an accurate introduction: tenderly country, both funny and poignant, and a little raunchy, too.
“I want them to know right off the bat who I am,” says Butt, who can often be spotted riding around her neighborhood in a golf cart, wearing a tank top with the words “Cowboy Pillows” written across the chest, sometimes with husband and Flatland Cavalry frontman Cleto Cordero in tow. “If you’re clutching your pearls and thinking that is icky, better to know now.”
WHEN BUTTS STARTED WRITING for Hello, Honky Tonk, she thought she might want to focus on an album of mantras. Songs, like “Never Really Mine,” that give the listener a little something to linger on (in this case, the advice is that if a woman can steal your man with ease, then he was probably never yours to begin with). But one night, while out at her local honky-tonk Skinny Dennis in East Nashville, she had an idea. “Maybe it’s not mantras, but just different people I see every night at a bar,” Butts explains.
Of course, with Butts’ creative hand, it was never going to be that simple. Chicago would provide the inspiration, but there was another, maybe more unconventional, idea at play. And for that, she once again has a question. “Have you ever seen the Country Bear Jamboree?”
Butts is referring to an attraction at Disney World that features somewhat trippy animatronic bears playing country and bluegrass songs with little hats, washboards, and banjos. There is even one bear who descends from the ceiling on a vine-wrapped swing, with whom Butts felt a particular kinship. It’s an image that even inspired the cover art of Hello, Honky Tonk. Sure, it sounds a little wacky. But in her hands, it works — the entertainer onstage, going to any length possible to get a laugh, a cheer, or a tear from the audience. She’s wants them to understand that she sees them, even if no one else might, and leave them with little nuggets of wisdom along the way.
Songs like the hilariously cheeky “Bacon Naked,” written with Natalie Hemby, are packed with one-liners (“don’t fry your bacon naked and don’t kiss a man who’s taken,” she sings, both wise pieces of advice) while “Everybody Wanna Sing a Country Song” speaks invitingly to a world becoming increasingly more enamored with country music. “Y’all means all,” she offers, and Butts, who has featured drag queensin her music videos, means this furiously.
“Kaitlin Butts is both Red Dirt and rhinestones,” says Republic Records executive vice president Mary Catherine Kinney, who signed Butts. “She is uncontainable, deadly sincere and inherently honest. Hello, Honky Tonk is Kaitlin in her purest form, creating an imaginative world rooted in her own truths. Only Kaitlin could tell the story of the human experience through the everyday characters of a honky-tonk. The first drink at five o’clock, the sting of a wandering eye, girls commiserating in the bathroom over their relationships, the loneliness, the escapism, the hope of rekindling a love that’s nearly burned out, and the wild fun of it all. Somehow, all of life lives within the walls of Hello, Honky Tonk.”
The album works both as a front-to-back journey as much as it does individual songs, but, when she was finished, something was missing: herself. It was Kinney who noticed. “She said,” Butts remembers, “’I feel like these songs are characters, and I can see you in all of them, but where is the entertainer? Where are you in this album?’”
Butts was a little annoyed. She was toying with a similar idea, but she was also at the end of her rope and exhausted. What came out is the gorgeous, heartbreaking Broadway-esque ballad (New York’s Broadway, not Nashville’s) called “What More Could You Want.” It’s a song for the fans, the algorithm, the business. It’s for a world that wants more, more, more from everyone, all of the time, and especially its women. A world where Butts remembers hearing people recommend years ago that she get to her “artist weight”; a world that convinces women that “they might need a facelift or Botox in their 20s.” More than anything, she wanted to relay her undying love for the art of entertaining despite it all. “How I will literally do anything to hold your attention or just keep you loving me,” she says, “because I care about the connection of performing so much.”
It’s already starting to take off on TikTok, but Butts refuses to lead her career by always considering what might work best on social media, even if it helped get her here. “Thinking about what would be the most TikTok-able sound? Kill me with a gun please,” Butts says. She believes that a good social media moment just comes down to writing your best songs. “I think it validates the songwriting if there is a moment that becomes a hook. If you’re writing watered-down shit, there’s nothing to TikTok to.”
Still, it’s part of the game. Tomorrow she’ll record a TikTok post for “What More Could You Want” in the heart of Times Square. It’s harder than ever, she says, to say no to anything. “You have the tools, you have the people, you have the money that you need for the first time,” Butts says. “I’m going to go as hard as I can, even if it exhausts me completely. But you do start to wonder about all those internal things that you’ve been told, like that women have shelf lives. Or that we only have so many years we can have children. But whenever things start picking up, it’s like, ‘This is my window and I’ll be damned if I let anything else get in the way.’”
Rest is getting harder to come by, but Butts recently carved out some time to go back to Oklahoma to visit her mom and eat some homemade, gluten-free, chicken-fried steak. She needed the break, but knows that even a few days out of the circuit can be taboo when everything is moving at warp speed. Butts remembers when Langley canceled some shows in August of 2025 to rest, and it made headlines. “It was like, only two weeks that she even took off,” Butts says, visibly annoyed. “It’s hard watching people skate by with minimal effort,” she adds. “I’m feeling that Taylor Swift song ‘The Man’ in my head all the time.”
The one thing Butts will always make time for, though? A night out on the town at one of her beloved honky-tonks, dancing with the crowd. A few weeks after our lunch, she’ll be shimmying at New York’s cowboy-themed gay bar Flaming Saddles, drinking vodka straight from the bottle. “After all,” she says, “my tits may never be this high again.”
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