Musician and producer Butch Walker is “about halfway done” with a memoir that he says will offer some insight into a career of making music, both on his own and for other, more celebrated friends.
“It’s not all just sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” the Georgia-born Walker, who hopes to publish the book in early 2011, tells Billboard.com. “It’s actually more just kind of funny and quirky about my kind of weird upbringing and stuff I’ve never told in interviews. There’s a lot of girl talk, and I spend a lot of time talking about the colorful people in my life — people you’ve never heard of and definitely people you know — who may have come and gone that, in interviews, wasn’t the right place to talk about it.”
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Walker — who over the years has led the bands SouthGang and Marvelous 3 and also worked with Avril Lavigne, Pink, Weezer, Katy Perry, Dashboard Confessional, Lifehouse and many others — has tentatively titled the book “Drinking With Strangers.” “That pretty much sums up all the stories,” he says. The tome will offer “a few studio stories, for sure,” Walker adds, but not in a particularly in-depth fashion. “I read this Tom Petty book, ‘Conversations With Tom Petty.’ It was great and a great geek thing for me, ’cause I’m a studio geek. That being said, I would feel like I’d be copying if I did that, and Tom Petty has a much more significant catalog of work than I do. But hopefully there’ll be enough interesting things there for people to get some entertainment.”
Walker is currently on the road with his latest band, the Black Widows, promoting his fifth solo album, “I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart.” Walker is high on both the record and the group and says he “can definitely see us…doing a ton of stuff together and hopefully keep our momentum going. I think we should give this another go next year.” Before that, however, Walker is also working on songs for Pink’s next album and will be touring with her in June in Europe. “I think we’re going to spend a lot of time on her bus working on songs for another record,” he says. “That’s going to be a lot of fun.”
In the fall, meanwhile, Walker will be working on a “band project…me and some of the Raconteurs guys,” though he doesn’t specify which ones. He does however, predict that “it’s gonna be super fun, like a total motorcycle rock band.”