Honestly, brilliant.
Kaitlin Butts has really made a name for herself in the country genre, coming from the Texas scene and putting out fantastic albums like 2024’s Roadrunner! and 2022’s What Else Can She Do.
And if her name sounds familiar and you can’t quite place why, it might be because her song “You Ain’t Gotta Die (To Be Dead To Me)” went viral on TikTok last year, which was included on her aforementioned Roadrunner! album. She will be opening for the likes of Ella Langley and Brooks & Dunn this year, and she’s really starting to crossover into the mainstream which is really fun to watch.
And during a recent appearance on the Girls In Low Places Podcast, Kaitlin spoke about some of her early days playing in small bars just trying to get by and do enough to get through to the next show. And she had a very unconventional, yet genius, strategy.
Kaitlin is married to Flatland Cavalry frontman Cleto Cordero, they tied the knot in 2020, but before she found him, she was on Tinder, but it wasn’t strictly romantic, she explained. She would invite all of the guys she was talking to on the dating app to her shows… but she wouldn’t just give them the tickets for free, explaining that if ten of them paid $10 for their ticket, that totaled up to be $100, and obviously, this was a time when every ticket she sold really mattered:
“I would get on Tinder and invite all the boys from Tinder to my shows. $10 of pop, honey, that’s $100! And I would see all of them like hanging out at the bar, and I’d be like, they have no idea. They have no idea.”
Just brilliant…
And of course, my first question was, what would she do at the end of the show when they were probably all expecting to hang out with her, or at least meet her… and she says she would just leave without a word or explanation:
“I would leave!”
I very much respect the hustle, and it makes for a hilarious story now… she ultimately met her husband through music, but at least she made her time on Tinder worthwhile. Kaitlin was just featured on Willow Avalon’s brand new single, “Hypothetically Speaking,” which you should definitely check out here:
“Hypothetically Speaking”
“You Ain’t Gotta Die (To Be Dead To Me)”
