The Space Between Years: Butch Walker’s Peachtree Battle & the Shape of Losing a Parent

Butch Walker - Peachtree Battle EP 

Photo courtesy of @staringintoacloud on Instagram

There’s something about the time between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Everything feels suspended. Like we’re caught in the quiet bubble where time slows down. The celebrations are over, and yet the year is still dragging its heavy feet out the door.  The leftovers are still in the fridge, but the chairs at the table feel… emptier. You notice who wasn’t there. You think about the ones who won’t be. Every year, some of our people expire, and we’re expected to wipe our eyes, write some goals, and carry on like the world isn’t quietly rearranging itself, like a wicked cog puzzle with only moving parts.

It’s a reflective time. A heavy time. A heart-following time.

Butch Walker’s Peachtree Battle EP

I wrote this months ago, but couldn’t bring myself to post it. It felt too heavy. Too tender. Too much.

But now, in this strange quiet, it feels like the right time.

Records like this one don’t just sound different on vinyl, they feel different. They feel closer. They breathe with you. Peachtree Battle EP is one of those. It feels a bit wrong listening to it on my phone, so I try to put some effort into getting it out of its sleeve and onto the turntable.

Spinning this EP is like cracking open a family album you forgot you weren’t ready for. The needle drops and that familiar Butch Walker sound fills the room: the way he sings about loss without dramatics, about fathers and sons with the kind of honesty most people reserve for late-night drives and parking-lot confessions.

This record was written in the shadow of grief, but it doesn’t drown in it. It watches grief. It studies it. There’s a warmth to the crackle, a hum that feels like fingers brushing the inside of your wrist. 

When the needle drops, the very air shifts. There’s a warmth to the crackle, a hum that feels like fingers brushing the inside of your wrist. And Butch’s voice enters the room the way a memory does: unannounced, familiar, and a little devastating.

I wasn’t prepared for how personal this EP would feel again.

Not just for him… but for me.

My dad passed in 2017, and there are still days where the grief moves like weather - quiet, atmospheric, touching everything without asking. I don’t talk about him much, but I write about him all the time. The words catch in my mouth, so I smuggle them into photographs or poems instead. But listening to Peachtree Battle feels like someone opened a window into a space I usually keep closed.

The title track always gets me.

That slow, golden ache, like Sunday light across a kitchen table that still feels like someone else’s. The guitars shimmer, warm but wavering, like breath caught between remembering and letting go. It’s a song about the quiet bravery of showing up when life feels unbearably altered. He sings like he’s trying to build a bridge back to someone he can no longer reach.

The way he sings about a father you’re trying to hold onto with both hands, even as the world insists on pulling him away.

It reminds me of the last time I saw my dad fully himself, smiling in that small, tired way, pretending he wasn’t in pain, trying to make me feel okay. That’s the thing about losing a parent: you don’t just remember them as they were; you remember who you were when they still existed. You remember the version of yourself that still had a place to return to.

When “Coming Home” plays, I always close my eyes. There’s something about that gentle rise in the chorus that feels like an almost-hug. One of those invisible ones you feel across distance and years.

It’s tender.

It’s steady.

It’s a hand on the shoulder from someone who can’t physically reach you anymore.

It’s the kind of track that makes you instinctively exhale halfway through, without realizing you’d been holding your breath.

Across the EP, there’s this undeniable tenderness. Butch isn’t performing pain; he’s cataloguing the way it moves through a person. How grief turns you softer in some places and steel-hard in others. His voice cracks without collapsing. His lyrics bleed without spilling. He sings like he’s tracing the outline of his grief with careful fingers, learning the new edges of his own heart. It’s vulnerability as a slow burn, something warm enough to hold, something that asks nothing from you except honesty.

On vinyl, the warmth becomes physical. The room leans in.

The songs feel lived-in, heirloomed, smoothed by touch.

This isn’t just an EP. It’s a turning-point snapshot of a man mid-freefall, still somehow finding melody in the wreckage. It’s a gift to witness. It’s a privilege to hold it in your hands.

If you’ve ever grieved a parent, or tried to navigate the unsteady terrain between who you were and who you’re forced to become, Peachtree Battle sits with you: quietly, patiently, shoulder-to-shoulder.

And sometimes that’s all you need from a record. It is the kind of record you don’t just listen to - you let it sit on your chest. You let it change the rhythm of your evening. You let it remind you of your own battles, your own losses, your own soft places.

And maybe that’s why I keep returning to it. Because Peachtree Battle doesn’t try to fix grief. It simply lands you a shoulder to lean on, quietly, until you’re ready to face it.

Just like my dad used to.

Just like I wish he still could.