In the 20th Century, being a music artist involved being everything to everyone. You had to gain mass exposure to have any luck of success and without it; you were as good as dead. Only a decade into the 21st Century, the rules have changed. You no longer have to be the biggest act on the planet, you just need to find a loyal audience and build it one by one. This involves catering to them, but on the flipside, if you cater enough, they trust you enough to take them on your own artistic journey. No other act in the last decade has better created, built, defined and taken care of niche fandom than Butch Walker. He started the decade with Marvelous 3, broke them up, produced a few dozen acts and has released five solo albums in the process. It's been a slow but steady build and as a result, he can sell-out clubs with ease across the country with little to no radio or television promotion. One of the key's to Walker's success is the intimacy and personal touch he elicits in concert. You feel his art, you sense his wonder and you dive deep into his psyche. This past winter, Walker did something truly unique for his followers; he performed albums in their entirety in small and intimate shows. Walker is an artist always moving forward never wanting to live in his past, so these shows (performed in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago) provided the fans with a rare glimpse into the past and after witnessing all four Chicago shows let me tell you what a journey it was. Arriving on stage in a hat, flannel shirt and jeans, Butch Walker began his four night stand at Schubas night club in Chicago by teasing with the crowd how the opening track on his 2004 album Letters was nothing more than a bunch of overlapping high pitched vocals…before he nearly replicated "Sunny Day Real Estate", a twenty-six second intro to his illuminating Letters record. This is something the core fans salivate for and Walker is doing it with great imminence but even better, he's conveying the songs with intense believability.

Letters was my formal introduction to Butch Walker and the album, steeped in heartache and melancholy yet painted with wide and lush pop brush strokes. I declared the record the sixth best of the decade, so to see the full album performed in a cozy venue is an opportunity I couldn't miss. Accompanied by his friend Gregory MacDonald (from the Canadian band Sloan) on piano, Walker surged ahead with a smile inducing "Maybe It's Just Me", delivered with lamenting strumming and some rather fabulous organ fills. Up next was "Mixtape" and to my astonishment, it was sung in a hushed manner where one could hear a pin drop in the crowd. Walker's shows are known for the fanatical sing-a-longs his fans provide but on this evening, everyone seemed to get the note that these shows were small, intimate and about the albums, so for the most part, the crowd stayed tight lipped allowing the songs to breathe. Walker barely touched his acoustic during the song, allowing the lyrics to fall from his lips and feel as if a close friend was sharing a confessional with you. The entire evening showed these songs in a more laissez-faire approach. Despite being unplugged and not having a band behind him, he was able to show the songs stand on their own, with beefed up production or not. "#1 Summer Jam" featured snippets of "Cruel to Be Kind" and "Silly Love Songs", but it was Walker's lyrics that soared out at the crowd. Beneath the sunny strumming, are some of the most beseeching lyrics Walker ever has committed to paper. Listening to a Butch Walker record is akin to a long and deep conversation with a close friend. One of the reasons for Walker's expanding fan base is the unadulterated truth with which he conveys his material. Nothing seems to be too personal to commit to tape. We all feel like these are letters we would write in the depths of despair, albeit with less poetic magic.

"So At Last" was complimented by a 12-string acoustic while the cleaning confessional "Uncomfortably Numb" was done on a mandolin featuring Taylor Swift's "You Belong To Me" in its entirety in the middle of the song. Walker has always had a penchant for doing charming covers and this one was no different. What made is distinctive was the way he weaved it so fluently into one of his own songs. "Joan" was understated as ever. "Don't Move" while still affecting featured a more self-possessed vocal, yet it was equally devastating. With the exception of "Lights Out" this was an unplugged evening where the personal nature of the songs was on display for everyone to hear, see and feel. "Lights Out" was reworked in a drenched bluesy reverb that wouldn't have been out of place on a Black Keys record, one of the evening's many highlights.

When Letters was released in 2004, Walker had made a name for himself as a top tier producer and someone with an ear for melody, but Letters was his true arrival as it stood next to anything on the radio at the time and was equally weighty in smaller circles where word of mouth of his performances spread like wildfire. Walker mastered his production techniques on his most enlightening and profoundly personal record of his career (at that time). The stories, like "Joan", feel so real they have a documentary edge to them and the reason people get lost in them is they feel as if Butch stole a page from their diary. Walker admitted to the crowd that he wrote these songs so long ago that he has issues getting in the headspace to perform some of them. I admired this honesty; other acts would lie through their teeth and tell you the music is as close to them as ever. Despite Walker's admission, I didn't feel any of the performances were detached or inexpressive. He gave his all in each of the thirteen performances.

No other art form do we expect the artist to reach backwards and give so much of themselves. We don't expect painters to re-paint masterpieces, we don't ask Stephen King to re-write "Carrie" and we don't ask Robert DeNiro to reprise to roles of Travis Bickle or Jake LaMotta, but musicians, we expect them to deliver their old songs from the same headspace with which they wrote them. This is complicated, but Walker seemed to handle it all with ease. Performing three albums in their entirety takes more than just the physical effort, but a mental one as well and I'm not sure if the audience ever fully appreciates this. Butch Walker is a forward thinking artist always creating and evolving yet during the evening's finale, "Stateline" (a hidden bonus track on Letters) the performance was so intense it brought the evening full circle as the confessionals immediately felt freeing. No one can prescribe a prescription for heartache and pain but hearing stories and relating to them makes us feel like we're not alone. For many, this is the defining moment between wallowing in your past and moving forward. Letters may be a collection of songs to someone who stole your heart, but it's also about taking those first steps forward into a new light. As we shall see in the evolution of Butch Walker in the last half decade, he moved forward and flourished.

Check back for reports on all four shows this week on antiMusic.