Good Grief

Good Grief is the latest album from singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer and former Suede member, Bernard Butler. It’s his best album yet – a very personal, intimate, honest and reflective collection of songs, which, lyrically, tackles subjects including his religious upbringing and Catholic guilt, his teenage years when he was dreaming of a life in music, anxiety, the companionship of solitude, and, how as a young man, he was often shamed for showing his emotions.

Butler produced the album, and plays a lot of the instruments: guitars, drums, bass, piano and violin. He’s also joined by a small amount of guest musicians, including long-time associate Sally Herbert on violin, who arranged the strings, cellist Ian Burdge, and violinist Jo O’Keefe.

Good Grief opens with the cinematic mini-epic and first single, ‘Camber Sands’, which, with its mariachi horns, piano and violin, is a soundtrack to jumping in your car and escaping from London to be beside the sea: ‘We’ll get away from this town where the pavement’s stained – it’s the backstreet of your heart that’s clogging up your veins…’

It’s like a scaled-back version of Springsteen’s ‘Born To Run’, but rather than putting the pedal to the metal on Highway 9, Butler is hitting the M20 and heading for the East Sussex coastline.

It’s a striking way to start the album and is followed by the equally stirring ‘Deep Emotions,’ which has a gorgeous, folky, Bert Jansch-like acoustic guitar intro – Butler was a friend of Jansch’s and collaborated with him – but then slips into rock-soul territory, with a big chorus, finger clicks, soaring strings and a superb, liquid, ‘70s-sounding electric guitar solo.

There’s more lush orchestration on the wintry and moody ‘London Snow’, which was partly inspired by the city of London becoming a ghost town during COVID.

‘The Forty Foot,’ has some wonderful, spiralling acoustic guitar patterns and startling electric playing. It’s a shadowy and dramatic song about wrestling with Catholic guilt and it takes its title from the name of a swimming spot in Ireland, near Dún Laoghaire, in Dublin, which is where Butler’s parents are from. He recalls it from childhood holidays.

Not all of the songs on Good Grief  are new – ‘Clean’, a sparse, bluesy ballad that was written with Edwyn Collins, first appeared as a B-side in 2001, but Butler re-recorded it for this album.

There’s also another co-write on the record – final song, ‘The Wind’ is a beautiful, stripped-back, country-tinged track, which has opening lines penned by singer and actress, Jessie Buckley, with whom Butler made the 2022, Mercury Prize-nominated album, For All Our Days That Tear The Heart.

During the writing and recording of that record, Butler used certain techniques and processes which then informed the making of Good Grief.

‘Living The Dream’, with its Spanish guitar and whistling solo, mentions Butler’s teenage ambitions of being a musician and has echoes of some of the more epic moments on his debut, ‘People Move On,’ and his work with David McAlmont in the duo McAlmont and Butler.

Talking of old groups, ‘Pretty D’, is partly a love song, but was also written about getting a band back together – it was influenced by the black comedy The League of Gentlemen, in which the character, Les McQueen, former member of glam rockers, Crème Brulee, is left mortified and skint after a reunion doesn’t go quite as planned.

In the lyric, Butler sings: ‘Well, it’s been 20 years since you broke my heart, oh, 20 years, we’ve been falling apart…” Well, it’s been 25 years since Butler’s last solo album, but it’s been well worth the wait. 

This is a stunning, powerful and beautifully produced record that’s easily one of the best releases of 2024. Good grief, indeed.

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