Butch Walker’s previous album, Afraid Of Ghosts, written in the wake of his father’s death, was his darkest. Stay Gold finds him facing the future by looking backwards, on a record stuffed with homages to the artists who inspired him, from Bruce Springsteen to The Pretenders.
Lyrically, especially, this is a portrait of Springsteen’s America, the opening title track placing us among the mill workers of Walker’s Georgia home own and celebrating their bar-room sense of positivity in a dead-end town. Each track is a short story, a beautifully composed snapshot of a moment in a life, all set to choruses masterfully crafted to slot in alongside the radio-rock classics of the 1980s.
