How Skinny Dennis Inspired Kaitlin Butts’ Hello, Honky Tonk

On a set dressed like a stage in an old-time revue, the singer poses in a blue and white dance costume with a stuffed raccoon rowing a canoe. — Kaitlin Butts
Photo: Thomas Crabtree

When writing her new album Hello, Honky Tonk, out Oct. 30 via Republic Records, Kaitlin Butts spent a lot of time in one of her favorite neighborhood watering holes: East Side honky-tonk Skinny Dennis. She began making up stories in her head about the familiar faces who gathered there, from the two-steppers to the wallflowers.

“I kept visualizing all the songs within a honky-tonk,” Butts tells the Scene, “with the guy with the wandering eye, the lovers, the people on the dance floor, the entertainer — which is me — the bartender, the girls that are bitching about the boyfriend in the bathroom who are probably going to leave with him anyway.”

Butts also channeled her lifelong love of musical theater, casting herself as a countrified Roxie Hart and dreaming up her own beer joint, Katie B’s Honky Tonk Saloon. The record is a kind of vaudeville stage show with each character in the tavern getting their moment to shine.

“It’s me from the stage turning the spotlight to different corners of the room,” Butts explains.

Kaitlin Butts Is the Coolest Theater Kid in Country Music

Talking with the singer-songwriter about her ‘Oklahoma!’-inspired opus ‘Roadrunner!’ before she plays Exit/In

It’s not the first time Butts has embraced her theater-kid experience. Her stellar 2024 album Roadrunner!, which features the viral barnburner “You Ain’t Gotta Die (To Be Dead to Me),” was inspired by the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!

“I’ve always had this common thread of country [with] my outfits and songs that I would choose to sing, even as a theater kid,” Butts says. “There’s always some sort of country theme. Or I’d be doing Annie Get Your Gun with a rifle on my back or singing about killing a guy. All the themes that would go towards what I do now.”

The 14-track album opens with a spoken-word dispatch from Katie B’s courtesy of Grammy- and multiple CMA Award-winning country star Lainey Wilson. “I was like, ‘Who has the most country voice that I can think of?’ — and that’s obviously Lainey Wilson,” Butts says of her friend and former tourmate. “She’s just somebody who I adore and who said yes, no hesitation, and sent it to me within 24 hours.”

If Butts were to create her own stage musical, the songs on Hello, Honky Tonk would be a perfect fit. The rowdy “I Wanna Be Bad,” inspired by a night out at Skinny Dennis, serves as the scene-setting opening number. “The Joker” and “Bacon Naked (Take It From Me)” showcase Butts’ gift for wry humor, while the forlorn “That Makes One of Us,” an ode to the lonely hearts at the bar who feel invisible, brilliantly channels Chicago’s “Mr. Cellophane.”

The autobiographical “What More Could You Want,” a devastatingly honest portrayal of feeling alone in the spotlight, would be the showstopper at the end of Act I.

Photo of the singer in a brown Western outfit grasping the handles of a swing dressed to look like it's covered in flowering vines. — Kaitlin Butts
Photo: Thomas Crabtree

“I kind of needed to be at the end of my rope to even write that song,” Butts says. “I just remember standing over [co-writers] Natalie Hemby and Topher Brown [saying], ‘I just want the song to feel like I’m at the end of the number and I’m out of breath and I’ve got jazz hands and I’m wondering if they like me yet. ‘Do you like me? What if I tried this?’’ I feel like that constantly, but I love it. I love trying to figure out what people like. I love messing up and correcting or saying: ‘I don’t fucking care if you like it. This is what I am.’ It’s just this ever-evolving thing.”

Hello, Honky Tonk comes on the heels of Butts’ greatest commercial success to date. “You Ain’t Gotta Die (To Be Dead to Me)” introduced the Tulsa-born singer-songwriter to a slew of new fans. She’s since toured with Ella Langley and Lainey Wilson and was recently nominated for a MusicRow Award for Breakthrough Artist of the Year. But that success comes after more than a decade of diligently paying her dues. The 33-year-old recalls years of performing to crowds at fairs and beer gardens from the back of a truck bed and playing four-hour gigs that often paid only in food.

“I feel really grateful to have this slow burn where I’ve done the gradual climb,” Butts says. “I’m now entering into this world that I don’t feel like I quite understand yet, but if I hadn’t had all those years, I don’t know what I’d be doing.”

On Oct. 29, Butts will play an album release show at Skinny Dennis, bringing Hello, Honky Tonk home to the venue and the crowd that inspired it.

“I’m excited to perform at the place where I see the album the most. I really just hope that people experience the songs and romanticize this little dusty honky-tonk.”