Butcher Brown: “This record is us not turning down any ideas, not being closed-minded to things that people bring up.”

Butcher Brown’s latest release, Letters From The Atlantic (Concord Jazz, distributed by Concord), is a testament to the group’s commitment to musical exploration and authenticity. The jazz quintet, known for their fusion of jazz, funk, soul, and hip-hop, approached this album with a fresh perspective, allowing creativity to flow organically.

This open-minded approach led to a collection of tracks that are both innovative and deeply rooted in Butcher Brown’s diverse influences. From the bossa nova rhythms to the indie grooves, Letters From The Atlantic showcases Butcher Brown’s ability to blend genres seamlessly.

Featuring collaborations with artists such as Melanie Charles and Mia Gladstone to further push the boundaries of the Butcher Brown sound, Letters From The Atlantic captures both the intimacy and expansiveness of their sound as the jazz collective take you on a journey across musical landscapes.

In our latest Cover Story, V13 sat down with Marcus Tenney and Morgan Burrs from the jazz group to talk about their approach to writing the new record, their influences and what Letters From The Atlantic means to the individual members of Butcher Brown.

The new album, Letters From The Atlantic, is an album you described as a journey through your collective influences. In terms of writing the record, were there any particular moments that triggered writing specific songs?

Marcus: “I think so. Maybe in personal thought. During the sessions, it just seemed like everything moved more organically. Some of the singles were made on the fly in the studio.”

In terms of a writing approach, what was that like for you? What did you enjoy about it and what were the challenges?

Morgan: “Not many challenges. When we’re in the studio, it feels like, I don’t think an ego thing more that I think we just work well together and we also just like it. It’s such a free thing where it’s not necessarily structured, but the way that we work together is structured, but it is also always just open. We can all read music and do all of that so just generally everything in the studio, we try to keep it all open.

I think that makes for not many challenges. If anybody has an idea, we’re gonna try it at least and see if it works. I feel like that makes it easier and that’s why we don’t run into many challenges. We just try to be open, we try to just keep the tape rolling, we try to be open. Sometimes it is who has the idea or who got the song but, a lot of times, we can just keep the on-the-fly thing happening. There are at least a few songs from every session that are kind of birthed that way.

A lot of ’em have lately been just like ideas that people wrote. This record we kept open. I think we’re gaining more chemistry too. It is steadily changing. With that record, we’re gaining chemistry, so it is becoming more and more fluid. Ideally, the music’s just getting better.”

While you were sending song ideas backwards and forwards, was there anything that came back which surprised you?

Marcus: “Yes. Virtually all of the features surprised me personally just because it’s one thing to be an artist and to work under direction like someone who has a vision or understands what their vision is giving you the guide points and telling you how to react in any given moment. Still, then it’s another thing to come up with something that hits the threshold, but you had no previous direction.

To my mind, when we’re dealing with music and intellectual property, some people are on the same page, and some people are not. It’s okay to not be on the same page. It’s okay to be on the same page. It made it so that the artists that we reached out to individually and as a group, were on the same page which, in my mind, is the best way to make a complete body of work… get artists that are on the same page right now together in a safe space to make music.

To me, every single feature came back with something surprising. In my mind, that means that, on release day, the audience who has been looking forward to this project and the audience that has not heard it but is gonna become fans, once they do hear it, it will be a level of surprise. It makes a record so much more sophisticated in that way.”

V13 Cover Story #093 – Butcher Brown

It must be exciting for you then because, as you said, when a fan puts a record on for the first time and they don’t what to expect, you’re gonna get millions of completely different reactions to the songs that you have got your ideas about…

Marcus: “It is and I think it’s fodder for the live shows because this organization is always improvising. We’re all musicians and we all play with different levels, types, different people, and musicians, but also we are trying to put together a musician’s life. It’s a lot of different things going on that we’re just used to handling and a lot of people aren’t necessarily used to dealing with on that level. I think that during these past few years of touring and going all over the world, we used that to zero in on what people are coming to the Butcher Brown shows for.

What are they paying us for? What are we really establishing here on a level where we can go to the studio and make something that they’re gonna wanna listen to in tandem with coming to the shows or in tandem with watching the videos, supporting the labels that we may or may not be on?

Doing all of the cog-turning stuff in the music industry. In my mind I want the records that Butcher makes to do that. A real functional force in the music industry.”

“If anybody has an idea, we’re gonna try it at least and see if it works. I feel like that makes it easier and that’s why we don’t run into many challenges.”

Do you think that the kind of organic, natural approach you’ve taken to this record will change the way you look at the live shows and how they are?

Morgan: “I think we keep evolving with how we view it but I feel like what’s always been consistent is that we’ve morphed into it. We’ve looked at the live show and the record as two different living organisms. What you make in the studio is what you make in the studio. We haven’t looked at it as something to limit us doing something live. Now, we get into the production and we try to make something that’s different and then, for the live shows, it’s how we make it work with the five of us.

Our thinking does evolve with that. We just try to attack ’em differently. The source material is the same, but the live version might be way different so playing some live version, we’ve birthed some cool stuff and then we’re looking at it thinking we gotta go back in and record it because that’s a new song even though the same chorus, it has just morphed into something else. It’s cool to see certain songs do that.”

Butcher Brown ‘Letters From The Atlantic’ Album Artwork

Given the kind of organic way you work, it could take songs down complete rabbit holes when you start playing them live and you start mixing them up a bit. That must make for an exciting live show as you almost don’t know what’s around the corner…

Marcus: “Right. Not even us. You have no idea because so many things are different about it and, being improvisers that have a heavy jazz background, that’s one thing that we all have in common. The one guy who didn’t go to school is the heaviest jazz musician which creates its conditions when we record and play music. Just the ability, just the fact that DJ knows so many records, Andrew has played in so many different organizations playing bass and Corey, basically is a drummer that plays whatever he wants, whenever he wants to play it. It sounds so good that everyone likes it.”

You’ve got the right people in the right room…

Marcus: “Those conditions create Butcher Brown. The band can run through musical styles without resistance, and without interruption, and by just being able to do that, we can connect to people.

More people are being bombarded by things on a constant basis, all kinds of apps, you gotta keep up with the passwords, you gotta keep up with this over here, you got that over there. You gotta maintain. The scatterbrainedness of society, and the rise of Spotify and, Apple Music have allowed people to listen to all different types of music…

Two things that you normally wouldn’t put next together in the record store, those records wouldn’t be next to each other unless they went in 99 cent bin. It just changed everything. Now we’re a live band that can bring these different styles.”

You’ve talked about how you guys all really connect and work together. Like we said, you’ve got the right people for the right jobs. How do you go about finding the right people to fit into that mould?

Morgan: “A lot of times, not all the time, but a lot of times, everything is starting instrumental. I’m sure there’s been one time where we’ve gone into it trying to get somebody on or we had that in our minds before we made the track, but usually we’re just making stuff and then we come away from it. Sometimes, in the studio, they would sound crazy or sometimes that’s after we go live with the music for a year however much amount of time.

Ideas come from everybody and I think that’s why it stretches from a range because there are artists that Corey’s thinking about that Devon’s not, or Andy’s thinking about that I’m not. It just works that way so, when you can see it through and get the people on there, then it’s cool.

Also, sometimes we might target a session or a song and do something in a different vibe then we try to send it to people that we think will elevate it. We talk to people that we respect and that we think respect us. There are people that we reach out to that we don’t get and there there’s a ton of people that we still wanna work with too. We just try to figure it out as we go. The collaboration part births a lot of cool stuff. Music is just collab. When you can get more people, you can get on the same page. It’s crazy.”

“I think we keep evolving with how we view it but I feel like what’s always been consistent is that we’ve morphed into it. We’ve looked at the live show and the record as two different living organisms.”

From the initial concept of the record to getting the end product, what’s the lasting memory you’ve taken away from it?

Morgan: “I remember listening back to the day that we were working on ‘Ibiza,’ it was called ‘House Three’ at first. Cory’s been crazy into house music and putting us on a bunch of stuff, like finding weird stuff. We made that song and worked on it all day, it was something different than we’ve ever really made before. I just remember the beat drop when it comes in during that chorus section and I just started losing my mind. I don’t think it ever got caught on camera, but I fell to the floor saying this shit is crazy. It was something brand new and that was it for me. We knew that one was gonna be a single. This is the energy of the album.”

Marcus: “It’s that vibe to me. Just the idea of Corey having the house vibe. We all have had experience with that on some level, but then Cory will bring it back to the forefront just because he’s the one that’s always running around travelling so he gets the human element a lot. He’ll bring it back and then DJ knows that vibe as a producer.

He knows what to do on keys, everybody knows what to do, and we can just coalesce around that particular idea. It kind of happens on that level with everybody. Everybody brings something that we can we can congregate around to extract ideas from. That’s how these projects come about. That’s a lot of what this record is. It was based on house but I feel like it has turned into… this is our way of getting the same level of attention that house would bring.

These songs aren’t necessarily house, but they are potent enough to be at the level. Hold You, that song is very captivating. It sounds like an old jazz record to me. This is a classic record. You hit the vibe there. We’ve played it in a bunch of places all over Europe, and all over the US and, in my mind, people respond every single time the same way.

This record is us not turning down any ideas, not being closed-minded to things that people bring up, that way we come up with this strange fruit.”

You described the record as a journey through collective influences. Do you think on a record like this each track is gonna take a listener down a different journey? There’s not one particular journey so to speak… it could go anywhere.

Marcus: “That’s what I think just because of the level that went into every song, the level of playing the recording knowledge. Being a person who’s privileged enough to be in the session, you see how people were thinking about the session and what happened between those takes and between those sounds.

There’s some serious work that goes on in terms of mental organization, in terms of fortitude, discipline, showing up because life is going on in the background, in the foreground. Just to look back at this album and think, Man, when I think about all this stuff that was going on with everybody, it’s a miracle that we made this.

“This record is us not turning down any ideas, not being closed-minded to things that people bring up, that way we come up with this strange fruit.”

It gives meaning to the songs as a whole. The individual songs to me are special just because I feel like they are different worlds and different paths. In the age that we live in and digital streaming, everything isn’t really about the album anymore. As much as artists would love it to be albums that matter, it’s not the case. Singles… merch matters, shows, your plan matters, who you are associated with, what your output level is, how often do you drop matters? There are so many other things that matter as an artist like Butcher Brown.

I think that this record is enough of an album intentionally through artistry, but it’s also enough of not an album so that it can be digested in segments. If somebody wants to listen to two songs, five songs, I think that’s just the 2025 way of making music and I think that’s the auxiliary aspect of what makes this album so great.”

Are there particular tracks on the album that evoke the strongest memories for you from a personal perspective?

Morgan: “A collab track that we did when Melanie (Charles) sent back ‘Unwind,’ which comes out tomorrow when she sent that one back, I like all the features, that’s the feeling with the features but when she sent that back, we had someone else in mind we wanted to get on it but just couldn’t, We should have thought of Melanie and she just sent something back that I just did not know what to do with. This song is amazing. I’ve never heard this.

We’ve also never done one of these. She’s just elevated it a lot and she just threw me off. We know how killing she is. It’s not that. I did not know this song could turn into this. It is that feeling. I want people to hear that. That’s the feeling. Whoever hears it, hears it, but you just get excited to show a few things.”

You went off into a whole different place then talking about that… Do you think tracks like that or moments like that when you’re writing a record, do you think that’s going to change the way you approach writing music in the future?

Marcus: “I think so. I think it will, uh, I think it will multiple fold. The first way is simply that we’re improvisers and we try to learn from what we did yesterday to improve what we do tomorrow. I think just based on that, it will improve the situation. I think it will also just incline us to give more freedom… give more confidence in the choice rather than putting confidence in the process when it comes to other people. We have confidence in the process because we’ve been doing this for a long time, but we haven’t been working with all these other artists on as many records as we have been just working with ourselves.

So, sometimes, it might be best to just send them the instrumental and see what happens. If they don’t come back, it might just be that they didn’t come back in six months. They might come back a year later, who knows? But, for right now, we’re just gonna go with what we got to fulfil the deadline.

Moving in a way that leaves more space for someone else as opposed to we didn’t get it our way. We’re just gonna cut the whole thing and move on.”

Doing it that way, a record or a song could go anywhere…

Marcus: “Like with that Melanie Charles song, that wouldn’t be what it is without what she did. It would be something else, but it wouldn’t be that.”

Something you mentioned is that there’s a list of people you wanted to collaborate with, some you got some you didn’t. Who is on your list?

Morgan: “It’s quite a list. Tom Misch. The homie. I don’t know what happened, buddy. I don’t know what happened, man. We called you Tom. There’s a call out though. Tom is the man. That’d be cool. We’ve run into Anderson a few times. He was actually at one of our last Richmond shows. He was just in town doing something so he came through and people just would not leave him alone. There was nowhere for him to be so he had to leave but it was crazy. Tyler, the Creator, that’s a big dream one for sure.

It’s a good list of folks. Rochelle Jordan, I’ve been really into her lately. Eventually, we’ll be able to be in the studio as much as we can really. At this point, it feels like the ideas. We have more ideas than studio time but eventually, it’s going to get there.

A lot is about the money. All these collaborations, we could just crank ’em out and, and just try to get everybody.”

Just to wrap up, Letters From The Atlantic, can you sum it up in one sentence…

Morgan: “We found some new sounds, and that’s a great feeling, so we’re happy.”