BIO

Rayland Baxter has spent much of his career chasing clarity, but his newest record, True Violet, feels like the first time he's truly found it. His 2022 album If I Were A Butterfly evoked transformation, but in Baxter's own view, True Violet is the record where the true metamorphosis has unfolded.

Catalyzed less by a sudden realization than by hard-earned understanding, True Violet is a record about the slow, steady process of becoming someone new. It's about looking in the mirror, taking responsibility for your own life, and sitting with difficult emotions instead of trying to outrun them.

Baxter spent the years around the release of If I Were A Butterfly, a record shaped by solitude and the loss of his father, touring heavily and weathering difficult relationships and dynamics in his personal life. He had built an enviable career—releasing acclaimed records and touring alongside Jason Isbell, The Lumineers, Kacey Musgraves, and Lauryn Hill—but upon his return to his quiet Tennessee hometown, he turned inward and finally found the stillness to confront old patterns. After more than a decade as a working musician, Baxter was familiar with the rhythms of making records, but when it came time to begin again, he found himself unsure of where to start.

"I sat in my chair alone for a year and wrote a bunch of songs, and what started off as an attempt to write a record got sideswiped by mediocre attempts I wouldn't even sing to my dog," Baxter recalls. "Then, like many times over the last three years, I called my sister. We talked about life and family and love and heartache, and our individual experiences with all of that. She simply encouraged me to write about what I was feeling, something I was avoiding in the early stages of writing.”

Rayland took his sister's advice and began writing with a newfound vulnerability. He'd sit alone each evening with his guitar for hours, excavating experiences and emotions. If a lyric or melody didn't click, he'd stop, walk around, dig up an old tour voice memo, and return to the guitar. Movies like Dances With Wolves and The Sandlot played in the background, their colors and landscapes bleeding into his creative psyche. By the time he entered the studio, he'd amassed nearly seventy songs.

That time of solitude was vital to Baxter. "I've grown into a person that I love being around," he says. "In order for me to correct my path, I desperately needed these years of peace and quiet."

From that trove of material he wrote during those quiet evenings came True Violet, a sweeping, tender, and sometimes raucous ode to reckoning and reconciliation. To Baxter, True Violet is about balance–he’ll tell you he feels it’s not “the most poetic he’s ever been,” but any attuned listener could tell you it feels deeply honest, and what is poetry without truth? As Baxter puts it, "It's very personal and bloody. There are bruises and bite marks in these songs. Tears and enlightenment and pains of the heart."

Baxter describes the album as carrying the colors of difficult emotions: "the reds of anger and the blues of sadness," ultimately arriving somewhere deeper. Violet represents the place where all those feelings meet, holding the complexity within love, disappointment, and pain.

True Violet is helmed by "Better Man," a steady swooner co-written with Tyler Ballgame that acts as a prologue for the journey Baxter takes throughout the record. He paints his efforts in Sisyphean terms on "Up and Down a Mountain" before descending into the depths of "Real Bad Rut." Ballgame also co-wrote "Bad Love," and sings background vocals on three tracks. 

“Tyler is music. Straight up,” Baxter proclaims. “We wrote two songs together on this album. It was just about as effortless and fun as can be. We were vibing and singing and trying things out and laughing and talking and writing and singing. I am excited for people that don’t know about him to discover his genius.”

At the heart of the record rests "The Fool," a missive on memory, perception, and the stories we tell ourselves, carried by radio-static vocals and easeful, aching instrumentation. "Bolly Plateau" returns to the landscape where the album was written, grounding the emotional journey in the physical place that made it possible, while the gospel-hued closer "Oh My Love" serves as a love letter to a hopeful future.

Though the writing process was solitary, the production of True Violet became a story of friendship, family, and collaboration. The album was co-produced by Paul Butler and Nick Waterhouse, with recording taking place over the course of a year and punctuated by moments of doubt—scrapping songs, returning to the drawing board, and calling in friends. Fittingly, Baxter left the sequencing of True Violet to his friend Shakey Graves (Alejandro Rose-Garcia).

“Paul and Nick are total maestros of music and they work great together,” Baxter reflects. “Sometimes I think there can be unspoken tension and big egos when you work with more than one producer. I never felt this with them … never. They bounce off each other, do a nice dance, and always maintain light and positive energy which I love to be around, especially while making music.”

True Violet is the first Rayland Baxter record made without the presence of his father, Bucky Baxter, a multi-instrumentalist best known for his work with Bob Dylan and as a member of Steve Earle and The Dukes, whose musicianship and encouragement had shaped every previous chapter of his career. "He used to be my phone call, my confidant, my teacher, and my musical guide," Baxter says. "He still is today, but he exists more in the invisible realm now, where feeling and intuition are how I experience his wisdom."

In the wake of that loss, Baxter's sister became an essential presence in both his life and creative process. "Honestly, it was her encouragement that brought these songs to life," he says. "She was actually bringing me back to life."

These days, Baxter has a steadier hand on the sails of his life, and you can hear it in his voice as he sings about living inside a feeling for too long and the hard-won relief of finally moving beyond it. "I was just letting it go," Baxter says. "The right people were in the room bringing the songs to life. I was observing. Feeling for the first time really steady in the process."

True Violet is about what remains after the storm passes: the lessons, the scars, the gratitude, and the possibility of beginning again. The medicine of the record lies in the contrast between the hardship that inspired it and the clarity, patience, and community that finally brought it into focus.