Tom Sless Finds His Swagger on “Country Butter”
Tom Sless didn’t have to spend much time wondering whether “Country Butter” was worth pursuing. The answer was already there in the room.
– WORDS BY CJ • PHOTOS COURTESY OF TOM SLESS
The song had been written at Summer Camp for Songwriters, a gathering in the north Georgia mountains founded by Sless’ longtime friend and collaborator Clifton Jennings Rhoad. By the camp’s fourth year, Sless knew the place well. Lake Burton, pine trees, a week set aside for writing, and very little reason to think about anything beyond the next song.
His first session paired him with John Samuel and Tim Allen, aka timlightyear, two close collaborators who had somehow never properly worked together before. Allen picked up a bass, Samuel started a drum loop and Sless grabbed an acoustic guitar.
“The only guiding force during the session was to keep the song fun,” Sless says. “And we had a lot of fun.”
That looseness never disappeared from “Country Butter.” You can hear it in the finished recording, partly because some of the original room itself is still buried inside it. Samuel had set up a microphone to capture the noise of the session as the three musicians shouted, sang and worked through ideas. Later he chopped that recording up and worked it back into the arrangement.
“You can still hear us making noise throughout the song,” Sless says. “To me it ties the song back to the lake, back to camp, and brings the listener into that intoxicating sweetness we felt in the moment.”
“You can still hear us making noise throughout the song,” Sless says. “To me it ties the song back to the lake, back to camp, and brings the listener into that intoxicating sweetness we felt in the moment.”
The acoustic guitar and bass from that initial session stayed too. They were never replaced.
What did change was everything built around them.
The demo leaned closer to country-pop, but Sless never saw the title as a genre description. “Country,” in this case, meant backroads, hills, lake water and the particular freedom of feeling like nobody is watching. As the song became part of a larger collection of new material, Sless and his collaborators pushed it somewhere bigger.
They pulled from the 1980s records of Bowie and Queen, adding gated snares, harmonized electric guitars and Juno synths. Onstage, the song stretches even further.
The final chorus jumps an octave and the outro opens into what Sless describes as a chaotic “Dick Dale Hebrew scale” jam, driven by a Bembe-inspired backbeat from drummer Cade Nelson.
There is still something unmistakably summery underneath all of it. Sless imagines the song reaching its final stretch sometime after midnight, when a cabin party has tipped over into delirium before eventually settling back down. The opening image — hummingbirds moving through soft air — returns, and suddenly you are back by the lake again.
But “Country Butter” also marks the point where Sless began moving somewhere else entirely.
“To me this song birthed the Tommy Turbo era,” he says.
The change was partly musical and partly psychological. Sless wanted a more confident, frontman-driven version of himself, one less interested in keeping his swagger under control. There had already been flashes of that character on his previous album, Heartland Ballerina, but “Country Butter” gave him permission to lean into it.
“I was tired of playing it safe with my swagger,” he says. “I loved the confidence in the lyric. The suave charm.”
A month after the Lake Burton session, Sless reunited with Samuel and Allen in Los Angeles. This time, rather than simply trying to write something fun, they arrived with an absurdly ambitious brief: make an epic. Something closer in spirit to “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Welcome to the Black Parade.”
That was when Tommy Turbo began to become an actual idea.
Sless later spent several months staying at Allen’s Cosmic Mama studio in Royse City, writing and figuring out what these increasingly oversized songs were becoming. The persona solidified there, and a subsequent record deal with JS and LIGHTWORK gave the project a framework.
“Country Butter” arrived before much of that was fully mapped out, but in retrospect it feels like the starting gun.
“We’re in the TURBO era now,” Sless says.
It is easy to hear why the song belongs there. It is playful without being coy, knowingly excessive without losing the looseness of the afternoon when it was first written. The production has become larger, the live version larger still, but the center of the song remains three friends at a lake, making something because it felt good to make it.
“I don’t think ‘Country Butter’ could’ve been written anywhere else,” Sless says. “It needed pine trees, lake water, and people with nowhere else to be.”
