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Song

Never Really Mine

Artist

Kaitlin Butts

Kaitlin Butts backstory

This time last year Kaitlin Butts went viral with the TikTok favourite You Ain’t Gotta Die (To Be Dead To Me).

And as the hashtag #DeadToMe trended across the US — with many of country music’s biggest names piling in — the Tulsa native finally got the attention her acerbic songwriting and ear for a tune deserves.

Fast forward 12 months (and 157 million TikTok views later) and she’s at it again.

Republic Records’ red hot signing dropped The Yeehaw Sessions for her new label last October.

But Never Really Mine teases what should be Butts’ first full length record since Roadrunner! — her critically acclaimed reimagining of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!.

One of the stars of last month’s Highways Festival at London’s Royal Albert Hall is on a roll.

Right now she’s starring in Willow Avalon’s hilarious Hypothetically Speaking video with the trad country throwback closing in on 120k YouTube views in two weeks.

And Butts is still basking in the glory of what proved to be a sold out headline run wrapping up the European Cowgirl Experience.

In Kaitlin Butts’ own words

“At a festival in Austin, my husband and I were walking through the crowd to get backstage and someone essentially catcalled my husband as I was holding his hand.

“It actually made me laugh out loud because she was right — he is ‘foiinneeee’.

“When we got backstage, my friend Fernando asked me if that ever bothered me and I said ‘a man that can be taken from me was never really mine’. 

“I thought about how much I wish other women felt that way and that they had that same security as I do.

“He doesn’t have a wandering eye and, if someone ever took his attention away, I wouldn’t be tugging at him to stay with me.

“I would want him to go on and get her.”

The verdict on Never Really Mine

There’s no better purveyor of a cutting country music salvo in Nashville right now and Butts proves the point on this brilliant Maggie Antone and Lola Kirke co-write.

Never Really Mine marries a typically barbed narrative with a dangerously disarming melody to gut-wrenching effect.

And Butts’ trademark honesty drips with authenticity as she considers the quandary of a partner’s wandering eye and latent disloyalty.

Trading on the ‘been there, done that, bought the tee-shirt’ attitude at the heart of all her best songs, the Opry NextStage class of 2025 inductee loves to tell it like it is.

Never Really Mine’s funny and foreboding in equal measure as Butts lazily laughs off a relationship ender.

Forget TikTok. The explosive Kaitlin Butts is much, much more than a social media bomb.

What’s next for Kaitlin Butts

A staple of this weekend’s CMA Fest, Butts plays the Nissan Stadium Platform Stage on June 6.

The live dates come thick and fast throughout the summer before a trip Down Under and three September dates in Australia as part of the Strummingbird Festival.

Main image credit: Lauren Rearic