PORT ANGELES — Singer-songwriter Matt Butler will perform his one-man show, Reckless Son, at 7 p.m. Saturday at Field Arts & Events Hall.
Tickets for Butler’s Saturday performance, at 201 W. Front St. in Port Angeles, can be purchased at https://tinyurl.com/u5r37u3d. Standard tickets, including fees, can be purchased for $30. Premium tickets, including fees, are $42.60. Field Arts & Events Hall also offers financial assistance for community members interested in attending the show. The form can be found at https://tinyurl.com/2zcnxtz4.
Butler said the show is about his experience playing music in jails and prisons across the United States. He has been performing in those spaces for nearly a decade, he said.
“It’s nine monologues that introduce nine songs performed on acoustic guitar,” Butler said. “It’s different episodes from my experience performing in jails and in prisons. Each one focuses on a different story or experience, but it also ties the whole thing into one larger narrative.”
Butler said the project was inspired in part by Bruce Springsteen on Broadway, where Springsteen offered broader narratives surrounding his songs and unified the stories as a whole.
Once resistant to Springsteen as an artist, Butler has come to understand him as a master of character study, he said.
“He’s like a method actor almost,” Butler said. “That connects with the work I do today. I try to take on some of the people that I’ve met, and I try to make their stories very human and relatable.”
While he’s on the Peninsula, Butler scheduled four additional concerts.
On Monday, he performed for a group at the Port Angeles Senior & Community Center. On Tuesday night, he performed for a group at the Clallam Juvenile & Youth Services. He is scheduled to perform for a group at Lincoln High School today. On Thursday, he will perform for a group of inmates at Clallam Bay Corrections Center.
Butler has performed at 52 correctional facilities across the country and will have performed at 54 by the end of the week, he said. He has performed multiple concerts at some of the facilities and said his total concerts in correctional facilities is in the multiple hundreds.
Butler said it would be hard to summarize everything he’s taken away from those performances.
“In the show, the main messages that I try to convey are that we are all more alike than different as people,” he said. “Even though we have at times radically different stories and come from different places and backgrounds, the things that we all are looking for in our lives are much more similar than not. The stories that people have are much more relatable than we would realize.”
Recordings of Butler’s music, along with videos of some of his prison performances, can be found at https://mattbutlersongs.com/home.
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@sequimgazette.com.
