See Butch Walker’s Raucous Live ‘Stay Gold’
Butch Walker smiles and shreds his way through a live version of “Stay Gold,” the title track from his newest solo release, during a new performance on the AT&T Audience Network. Premiering this Friday, November 11th, at 9 p.m. ET/PT, the televised concert focuses on songs from Stay Gold, with rock & roll guitars and sing-along choruses that find Walker putting a positive spin on the listlessness that filled his childhood days in a small, dead-end Southern hometown.
“There was so much of this small-town nostalgia coming back to me of growing up in Cartersville and hanging out with all my dirtbag, greaseball friends,” Walker told Rolling Stone Country earlier this summer, two months before the record’s August 26th release. “I started thinking I needed to go back and revisit The Outsiders,” he added. “That whole trajectory was my upbringing. That was everything in my periphery: yuppies over here, the enchanted ones, and the disenchanted over here. That set the tone, and then I wrote ‘Stay Gold’ and it was clear to me that this is the record.”
Pulling double duty as frontman and lead guitarist, Walker captains an expanded band that now includes Honeyhoney’s Suzanna Santo on fiddle and backup vocals. The result is a fiery performance of “Stay Gold,” with Walker and company mixing the anthemic sweep of Bruce Springsteen, the punky pop of the Replacements and the unabashedly larger-than-life guitar heroics of 1980s hair-metal stars into the same package.
At 8:00 p.m. ET, immediately before Walker’s concert special airs on AT&T’s Audience Network, DIRECTV and U-verse (DIRECTV Ch 239/U-verse Ch 1114), the Audience Network will premiere his episode of the documentary series Ernie Ball: Pursuit of Tone.