Lauren Rearick
Audio By Carbonatix
Kaitlin Butts can handle anything. Well, nearly anything.
“This weekend, when I grabbed my curling iron from the wrong end — that hadn’t happened before,” Butts says to the Observer. “That was the worst thing that’s ever happened 30 minutes before a show. I was like, ‘I don’t actually know what to do. This is terrible.’ It was so bad.”
As on-the-nose metaphors for an artist’s career go, the 33-year-old singer-songwriter from Tulsa, Oklahoma, seizing hold of something too hot to handle feels entirely appropriate for where she finds herself these days.
Butts is in the midst of a searing run: Signing a deal with Republic Records last fall; garnering acclaim for her breakout third album, 2024’s “Roadrunner!” and accumulating guest spots as quickly as she can turn out her own songs. Somehow in the midst of all that, she’s also relentlessly touring and finding time to write and direct music videos for herself and others.
It is, even in summary, verging on too much for any one person to reasonably manage. It’s also right where Butts wants to be.
“It feels difficult to even just live a life where I can feed myself, like I’m struggling finding time to do basic human needs, much less have a personal life,” Butts says. “But it is everything I’ve wanted and worked for, so it’s hard to resent it at all … We’re gonna keep pushing along. This is only a season, and someday, people won’t be calling.”
At the moment, however, Butts is on speed dial with a host of top-tier country acts, not least of which is Ella Langley, for whom she’ll open on Saturday, Aug. 15 at Fort Worth’s sold-out Dickies Arena. (Butts is sticking around for another North Texas gig, as she’ll headline Village Beach Club in Dallas on Sunday, Aug. 16.)
She isn’t just direct support for Langley; she’s also a co-star. The former musical theater kid makes an extended cameo in the music video for Langley’s chart-topping juggernaut “Choosin’ Texas,” alongside other contemporaries like Miranda Lambert, Tanner Usrey and Casey Donahew.
Butts has enjoyed a front-row seat as Langley’s hit single has endured as No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for a record-breaking 16 weeks (and counting), reclaiming the country music genre, even as it transcends its borders to become a mainstream smash hit.
“I feel like Ella is a really good example of … people are craving that traditional country music with piano and fiddle and acoustic guitars and all these things — and great songwriting too, with good hooks and good storylines that are easy listening,” she says. “It does feel good to see authentic country music being pushed all the way to the top, because fans are asking for it. … It does give me a lot of hope for female artists being at the top in general.”
Coming up country
On the strength of her sharply observed writing, arresting melodies and tireless work ethic, Butts, who is married to Flatland Cavalry frontman Cleto Cordero, has opened plenty of her own doors.
“There’s been a really big gap in that for a really long time — Ella is a good example; Lainey [Wilson] is a great example … of women that are writing killer songs … and putting on killer shows,” Butts says. “They’re being put at the forefront, because of fans wanting it. Everybody rallying behind those women is going to open more doors for people like me.”
Butts has amassed more than 157 million TikTok views and 67 million streams for the single “You Ain’t Gotta Die (To Be Dead to Me),” to say nothing of the viral success of her 2025 EP “The Yeehaw Sessions,” which demonstrated Butts’ dazzling range and eclectic sensibilities, with covers veering from Chappell Roan “Red Wine Supernova” to Don Williams’ loping ‘70s classic “Tulsa Time” to Jimmy Eat World’s fizzy alt-pop firecracker “The Middle.”
“[That EP] was just — like, I love this; these are the songs that me and my band love to play live or play in the van on the way home,” Butts says. “All these things that have influenced me are all over the place, but it all makes sense at the same time. Like, if I tell people I’m a fan of this, [they’re like], ‘Oh, that’s why your brain works that way.’”
Yet, as she works on songs for a forthcoming full-length record, which will serve as both her major label debut and the follow-up to the “Roadrunner! “(an album-length riff upon/reimagining of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s classic “Oklahoma!”), Butts finds herself uncharacteristically at a loss to describe what, precisely, these songs will sound and feel like.
“For this album, trying to articulate all of the influences — it’s been difficult because I can’t pinpoint one thing,” she says. “I sound psychotic trying to articulate my ideas because … I don’t know how to articulate that I want the ‘Country Bear Jamboree’ mixed with ‘Chicago’ mixed with … I don’t know … Splash Mountain at Disney World.”
While there have been hints in the finished product released thus far — recent singles “Never Really Mine” and “I Wanna Be Bad,” for instance, provide some indication — Butts is ultimately at the mercy of the material.
“I feel like the songs kind of start everything, and you go where that leads you, and try to tell the story from there,” Butts says. “The songs on this album have just started to reveal themselves as a theme, and you keep building upon that.”
Still a roadrunner
For now, Butts remains booked and busy, with a schedule taking her from one side of the United States to the other well into the fall, plus a handful of dates in Australia in October.
More than a decade into her career, though — wayward curling irons and all — she hows no signs of slowing her rapid ascent, confident in her ability to deal with whatever her life and art may yield.
“I’m glad I had this slow burn career, where I feel like almost anything can be thrown at me at this point … it’s happened before [and] I know how to handle it,” Butts says. “I’m pretty prepared for most things to go wrong: Sound to go out, guitar to not work, power to go out, or my dress falls off. Whatever it is, I feel like everything’s happened at this point that’s been embarrassing and weird, and you just learn along the way how to survive and still have fun and be entertaining … The show must go on. That’s always been the motto.”
Kaitlin Butts performs in support of Ella Langley at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 15 at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth. The show is sold out. Butts also performs at 11 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 16 at the Village Beach Club, Dallas. Tickets start at $22.
