Butch Walker Teaches His Son About Life With Song

From John Lennon's 'Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)' to 'Sarah' by Thin Lizzy, children have always been a good source of inspiration for songwriters. Now we can add singer and producer Butch Walker to the list of dads writing for their offspring.

Opposed to his more melancholy 2008 album, 'Sycamore Meadows,' which was named after the street he lived on when his house burned down in 2007, Walker's new record, 'I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart' ventures into more celebratory events including the birth of his first son. "It's basically a to-do and not-to-do book for him," Walker tells Spinner of 'Be Good Til Then.' "When he gets old enough he'll be able to hear it in a song as opposed to my father jokes about how he's so musically inept that he can't even play the radio. It's just one of those things he would probably have written it in a song if he could. I just decided since I could, I would."

However, don't expect a whole album full of songs inspired by Walker's son. He admits that while others can write endless amounts of tunes about their children, he'll probably just stick to this one. "It's not like after I had my son I wrote an album full of lullabies," he says. "I think that cliché doesn't hold up with me. I wasn't able to do that even though everyone was like, 'You're going to write so many songs about your kid, man,' I wrote one."

And that doesn't mean Walker won't write any more -- he just thinks there's more important things to do with his son than just write songs about him. "It doesn't mean I don't care," he says. "Well, I'm kind of busy changing diapers to write songs. I don't think I'm going to have much of a chance to do it."

'I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart' will be out exclusively on vinyl on Feb. 9 and then on CD and digitally Feb. 23.