Hello, Honky Tonk Tour
KAITLIN BUTTS
FRI, 18 DEC 2026 at 10:00PM CST
Ages: 18 & Over
Doors Open: 06:00PM
OnSale: Fri, 2 Oct 2026 at 10:00AM CDT
Announcement: Mon, 28 Sep 2026 at 10:00AM CDT
Kaitlin Butts spends a lot of time in bars and honky tonks. She may be there to work, but she’s also keeping an eye on the barstools, the dancefloor, the bathroom, and the shadowy corners — anywhere people may be offering her insight into human nature to use for her next song.
A lover of classic country, R&B and musical theatre, Butts busted out of her native Tulsa in the mid-2010s. She was immediately pegged as a gifted songwriter, combining laugh-out-loud humor and gut-wrenching pathos, and a valuable new addition to the red dirt music scene with her self-released 2015 debut Same Hell, Different Devil. Butts then began building her reputation as an outsize live performer the old-fashioned way, one honky tonk and bar gig at a time, honing a dynamic stage persona.
Her determination has paid dividends as acclaim has only grown both with fans and fellow musicians garnering opportunities to join Lainey Wilson and Ella Langley on tour, a 2026 MusicRow Award Nomination for Breakthrough Artist of the Year.
When the country firebrand isn’t actually onstage performing, she has a game she likes to play.
“I love to sit at the bar and make up stories for the people there and see if I can figure out what their deal is or guess who they're leaving with,” says Butts of her fly-on-the-wall fantasies of what life is like beyond the saloon doors. “I like watching all the different characters. Every time I go into a new place, it’s always the same people.”
That coterie of characters escapes the containment of Butts’ idle daydreams for a proper introduction on the Oklahoma native’s expansive new album Hello, Honky Tonk. It’s her first full-length project since signing to Republic Records in 2025 and the viral success of her deliciously snarky hit “You Ain’t Gotta Die (To Be Dead to Me),” from her critically-acclaimed 2024 album Roadrunner!, which has amassed more than 157 million TikTok views and 67 million global streams.
Due out October 30, the 14-track collection brings the colorful denizens of Butts’ own fantasy establishment — “Katie B’s saloon” — to life. A good pal, who knows a thing or two about honky tonk clientele, sets the stage in a spoken word opening number. In a wry twang, the honeyed Louisiana-inflected voice intones that the place gets all kinds of kinds, including, but not limited to: “The lovers, heartbreakers/The big talkers, unwanted advicers/The drinkers, line dancers, barkeepers, the ponderers/And the ones who worked way too hard who are probably gonna go buck wild, dance on the bar and lose their bra-ers.” In other words, you and everyone you know.
“This album really is my love letter to honky tonks and the night life,” Butts shares.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the bar. As Butts was writing the songs in late 2025 and early 2026, both on her own and with a murderers’ row of collaborators, she took detours to Broadway and Disney World, drawing inspiration from the musical Chicago and The Country Bear Jamboree, respectively.
“The thought behind the concept was how in Chicago, the character Roxie Hart is dreaming up what her show would look like and all the people in it,” says Butts, who began performing in musical theatre herself as a child and loved the idea of vaudeville-style vignettes. Another light bulb flickered on during a recent trip to see the original Jamboree before it was updated. The vintage sensibility of the Nashville-inspired stage show, a favorite of hers as a kid, felt like home. “When Teddi Barra came down from the ceiling on her swing, my mom and I just looked at each other and I was like, ‘That is me,’" she says of the cowboy-hatted, feather-boa sporting brown bear who inspired the album’s cover.
And yet even as Butts honors the merry murderesses of the Cook County Jail and a line-up of surprisingly sassy and lovelorn teddy bears, the sound is pure country, folding in other influences ranging from Merle Haggard and Roger Miller to the Chicks and Miranda Lambert.
“I picture all of this happening at Skinny Dennis here in Nashville,” she says of a popular honky tonk in town. “These are all the different people in the room. There's the bar fight that's happening. There's the bad girl that just got off work. There's me being the entertainer. There are so many people that really love the night life. It’s a connector for people. “
Butts recorded Hello, Honky Tonk in Nashville in batches with a mix of revered veteran session musicians and the members of her own trusted touring band and producer Tofer Brown (Little Big Town, Carter Faith). Based on his track record, she says she knew that Brown, who also co-wrote several tracks and plays multiple instruments on the album, would bring something to the table. After their first co-write, Butts’ suspicions were confirmed. “It felt good to be seen and understood right off the bat and by our second write I just felt so easily open to him.”
The same held true for her co-writers, a list that includes Brown, Natalie Hemby, Shane McAnally, Maggie Antone & Lola Kirke, Jon Randall and Jessi Alexander, Jessie Jo Dillon, and Lori McKenna among others. “I’m really working with geniuses,” says Butts, grateful for her collaborators. Individually and collectively the songwriters complement her gift for taking a familiar phrase and turning it on its head to fit a story to the distinct calibration of vulnerability and steel in her powerful voice, making Hello, Honky Tonk a full-body experience, tickling your funny bone and punching your gut in the space of a single couplet.
Following the intro, the album kicks off properly with the restlessly joyful opener “I Wanna be Bad,” in which our narrator is ready to blow off some steam. Co-written with Hemby, it brought Butts closer to the mindset of her fans. “There was a week where I wrote every single day and was feeling burnt out and I thought, ‘I'm ready to be entertained. I'm ready to drink alcohol. I need to go out,’" she says. “I'm starting to understand why some people who come and see me at shows are almost like rabid dogs needing to go out and have fun."
The night starts to loosen up as it slides into “The Bartender,” co-written with Hemby and Brown, all steel guitar and swagger as a mixologist lends an ear to those in need of a judgement-free confidant, featuring the sultry menace of TJ Osborne’s of Brothers Osborne rich baritone on backing vocals. The blueprint for the song, Vinnie Maniscalco, who pours drinks at Nashville mainstay Urban Cowboy, plays harmonica on the track. “He is a little town legend here in Nashville, and he's the bartender that's just cool, calm and collected, just here whenever you need him,” says Butts. “He knows everybody in town and I'm sure he's heard some shit and seen some stuff.”
Jessie Jo Dillon and Sasha Alex Sloan lent a hand on the simultaneously rueful and hilarious lament “The Joker,” in which Butts bemoans trifling men. “I feel like that’s the song the Sun Bonnets would sing,” says Butts with a laugh of the behatted Country Bear Jamboree trio.
“In my head, ‘The Joker’ and ‘Bacon Naked’ were kind of paired together,” she says of another Hemby co-write, a jaunty foot stomper in which the narrator dispenses wisdom to younger listeners, as disparate as “Don’t fry your bacon naked/And don't kiss a man who’s taken.” She pictures the pair of tracks unspooling at a very specific time of the night at the bar. “It’s when the girls go to powder their nose in the bathroom together and we’re spilling all the tea and we bitch about men,” says Butts. “But at the end of the night, we're going to leave with them. They're the dumbest and we love them.”
The album also features deeply poignant passages. The tremulous ballad “Still Got It” nails the yearning to feel desired, starting with that stranger across a crowded room. “This is new love and just that kind of almost awkwardness that comes with it,” says Butts.
The devastating “That Makes One of Us,” co-written with the revered three-time Grammy-winning songwriter Lori McKenna, is a character study of the visible but overlooked barfly in the corner. “I really wanted this song to sound undeniably honky tonk, like an old Merle Haggard song,” she says. “And then I started thinking about the song ‘Mister Cellophane’ from Chicago and how he's just in people's faces but no one sees him. Everyone's been the person that feels really alone in a crowded place and that ‘no one gives a shit if I leave or stay.’”
The album’s spiritual heart beats in the languid piano ballad “What More Could You Want,” a clearly autobiographical sketch of a performer regarding themselves in the mirror and asking how much more they have to give.
“That song feels exactly word for word what I feel like every day,” says Butts. “This tug and pull of loving this and craving this and loving to be on stage, loving every creative moment but also being stressed out wondering, ‘Do you like me? Do I need to be shinier? Do you want more?’”
While Butts fantasizes about the lives of those who come to her virtual honky tonk, she hopes that fans walk out of it not just knowing her better, but themselves as well. “All these songs are very deeply personal to me, and I relate to them word for word,” she says. “But my intention is never just to be relatable. I hope people find their own lives within the whole thing.” And like any good night out at the honky tonk, that they have a good time. After spending some time in darker corners on previous albums, Butts is ready to kick up her heels. “I'm excited to get to perform these songs and have a lot of fun on stage.”
The album concludes with what Butts predicts will become her go-to closing number, the gorgeous acoustic-guitar and fiddle ballad “Midnight I’ll Always Be Yours.” Written with Jon Randall and Jessi Alexander, the wistful paean to closing time, equal parts romantic and regretful, tips a cap to the classic picture book “Goodnight Moon.” “It doesn't get better for me,” she says of that liminal moment between the last song and the expanse of late night/early morning to come. “I love at the end of the night when it does go quiet and all you hear is the clinking of the bottles. I feel like everyone who is in the service industry or is a performer or just loves to go out and is leaving after they've danced all night can place themselves in that song if they love country music and love supporting it and love going out to honky-tonks.”
This event is a Reserved Seated event. Age policy: 18 & up with a valid ID. All ticket purchases are final. Billy Bob's Texas reserves the right to void, with or without a refund, any tickets that are being used for scalping. www.billybobstexas.com.
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Billy Bob's Texas, 2520 Rodeo Plz, Fort Worth, TX 76164-8208, United States
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