For Kaitlin Butts, today is full of firsts. The thirty-three-year-old Oklahoma-raised country singer is parked outside Ohio Stadium in Columbus, fresh off her three o’clock set at the Buckeye Country Superfest—her first stadium show. Still in the blush-pink lace dress and black cowboy hat she wore onstage, she’s traded her white knee-high cowboy boots for ankle socks and is sitting cross-legged on a leather couch in her first real tour bus while Hank, her fourteen-year-old shih tzu, sleeps beside her. The last rig—an RV she called “the bandwagon”—once died on I-40 the day before opening night of a tour, and years of road mishaps trained her to brace for disaster. “It felt weird to wake up and nothing had gone wrong,” she says. Today’s only casualty: a guitar string, snapped mid-song.
During her set, Butts played the lonely lament “Never Really Mine,” the first single from her full-length major-label debut, Hello, Honky Tonk, out in October, a winsome blend of countrified torch songs and rollicking numbers that showcase her flair for theatrics and sharp sense of humor. “In country music, there’s so much storytelling, and you can visualize it,” she says. “Lyrically, it’s the most fun.”
Butts’s penchant for the performing arts showed itself early. During a childhood gymnastics class in Tulsa, a teacher pulled her mother aside: Your daughter isn’t much for tumbling, she told her, but she won’t stop singing and dancing in the mirror. The fix was musical theater—voice lessons, ballet, tap, and jazz. “What comes naturally to me is the drama,” she says, “going that extra mile to create an immersive experience.”
In her twenties, Butts cut her teeth playing three-hour gigs on Stillwater’s strip of Red Dirt honky-tonks. Then came the viral moment—2024’s deliciously vengeful romp “You Ain’t Gotta Die (to Be Dead to Me),” which garnered 157 million TikTok views and propelled a decade of dues paying into the light. “We didn’t skip any steps to get here,” she says. “We’ve played every kind of stage.”
That single came from 2024’s Roadrunner!, seventeen songs that reimagined Oklahoma!, one of her favorite musicals, through a cracked windshield. Hello, Honky Tonk borrows its bones from another of her favorites, Chicago, which stages its musical numbers as stand-alone vaudeville “acts” rather than spontaneous, plot-driving songs. The album takes listeners inside Katie B’s Honky Tonk Saloon, where the owner trains the spotlight on each regular— the heartbroken, the big talker, the female singer onstage with her guitar fighting to be heard. “The breaking-into-song doesn’t make sense within the story,” Butts says. “She’s imagining what the act would be.” On the bus, she cues up early mixes of tracks, including “Bartender,” a barkeep’s-eye view of last call, and the showstopping ballad “What More Could You Want.”
Her wry humor also shines, as in the hilarious gallop of “Bacon Naked,” a knack she calls less a style and more a survival skill. “It comes from trying to see the funny thing in literally everything,” she says. “I could be having a complete meltdown and still find a way to laugh.”
Matt Hendrickson has been a contributing editor for Garden & Gun since 2008. A former staff writer at Rolling Stone, he’s also written for Fast Company and the New York Times and currently moonlights as a content producer for Ohio University’s Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Service in Athens, Ohio.