St. Louis native Norbert Leo Butz will celebrate the release of his upcoming fourth solo album, King of Hearts, at The Sheldon with a special Notes From Home concert on Friday, September 29. Butz says King of Hearts is a very personal album. The country-inspired recordings were created during the pandemic and include songs written by his eldest daughter, Clara Davis.
Butz is best known for his acting career, having starred in award-winning Broadway productions including Big Fish, My Fair Lady, The Last Five Years, and Wicked. He has also been featured in TV shows and movies such as Bloodline, Mercy Street, Fosse/Verdon, Give or Take, Dan in Real Life, and many more.
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Butz began releasing solo music in 2013, debuting his first album, Memory & Mayhem, live at 54 BELOW in New York City. His last album, The Long Haul, was released in 2019.
Butz describes music as his “night gig.”
“I really am an actor first, and luckily and gratefully, I do stay busy with really cool projects, but it’s hard to record when you’re working on those big productions. The way I do music is I kind of collect songs.” Butz says.
King of Hearts is a collection of songs that Butz started creating during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and has continued working on over the past couple of years. While filming Debris for NBC in Vancouver, Butz was not allowed to leave the country to visit his family for 10 months due to pandemic travel restrictions. He stumbled upon Blue Light Studio in Vancouver while living there and ended up recording base tracks for King of Hearts.
“I just needed something to do,” Butz says. “It was during the winter and it was super wet and cold, and I just needed to stay creative to keep from going nuts.”
With the release of this album, Butz is most excited to share the collaborations he was able to produce with his daughter with listeners.
“My oldest daughter is 26, and she’s working on her master’s in Ithaca, New York—she’s a wonderful poet and songwriter,” Butz says. “Over the pandemic she had been showing me songs, and I was like ‘Man, these are really good,’ so I helped her finish them a bit musically. But the words are all hers on two of the tracks.”
King of Hearts will also feature two songs written by Butz and a cover of a classic Dolly Parton song. The album will have a total of six songs, which Butz feels is the perfect amount for the story he is trying to share.
“I just thought the six songs worked really well together, I didn’t want to make it a full album,” Butz says. “I just wanted to say, ‘This is this little statement from this period of time.’ It’s really a kind of conversation between me and my daughter.”
Butz plans to celebrate the release of this very personal, country-style album with a hometown audience at The Sheldon alongside special guest Devon Cahill of indie-folk band Letter to Memphis.
“I met [Cahill] years ago,” says Butz. “She’s just such a great musician, singer, songwriter, and we know all the same stuff. So, we’ve sung together before and we’ve always wanted to do something a little bit more.”
Butz says he’s extremely honored to be given the opportunity to share his newest album with a hometown audience. While he often turns to music as a form of escape, Butz is excited to share a piece of work that he feels reflects his true self.
“I’m really excited, but I’m a little nervous,” he says. “Hometown audiences are sometimes the harshest. They’re the most welcoming, but they’ll know if I’m not delivering. In some ways it’s me coming back as myself, not any character or to host some benefit…just as myself. I’m really excited about that.”
Besides the album release, Butz has many other exciting plans for the future, including a reboot of the TV show Justified, titled Justified: City Primeval, which is set to premiere on July 18.
“I got to play a cop named Norbert of all things, and that was super fun.” Butz says.
Fans can also look forward to seeing Butz in the upcoming remake of The Exorcist titled The Exorcist: Believer set to release this October and an upcoming series for Hulu about former NFL tight end Aaron Hernandez, in which he will play head coach and general manager of the New England Patriots, Bill Belichick.
