Miami Heat star guard Jimmy Butler is a modern Renaissance man. Butler is a six-time All-Star and Olympic gold medalist, led the Heat to two NBA Finals appearances in the last four seasons, and went viral during the pandemic when he charged fellow players in the NBA Disney World bubble $20 for a cup of coffee he brewed in his hotel room (which evolved into BIGFACE, Butler's successful coffee company).
Now, he's also becoming a country music artist.
According to The Guardian's Claire de Lune, Butler has been hard at work producing his own country music album over the past year. As it currently stands, Butler has already produced a stable of 60 songs for the project, and he intends to have about 200 recorded that he can choose from for the album's final cut.
Jimmy Butler's been working on a country album for over a year now ?
Jimmy says he's recorded OVER 60 tracks and hopes to choose from "around 200" when he's done ?
(via @ClaireMPLS) pic.twitter.com/YRVFYJPCK9
— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) January 16, 2024
Unfortunately, basketball fans won't get to hear Butler's singing chops on the album. He says he's "like the DJ Khaled of this thing" — meaning that he's the one writing and producing the songs, as opposed to jumping into the booth and singing them himself.
One might wonder why Butler has decided on country music as his next entrepreneurial endeavor. Well, Butler — who was born and raised in Tomball, Texas by adoptive parents after his mom kicked him out — has been a huge country music fan all his life and is apparently on a personal quest to become "good at almost everything."
Yet the full story behind Butler electing to enter the country music space attests to his humility.
"There's so many people out there, and I'm one of them, that are like, 'Man, I can do that,' and you really don't know how difficult it is to make a No. 1 song, how difficult it is to have all these songs on the back burner," Butler told de Lune in the Guardian article. "And you got to pick the right ones. And it's fun, and I do love it, but my goodness, it's difficult. It's stressful — it's completely different from basketball."
Butler continued: "I'm not saying basketball's easy either, but just for people to be able to think they can just go do this or that — it's like, man, look. Humble yourself. It is incredibly fun, I've had a blast while doing it. But I will tell you that it's not easy."
While there is no release date for Butler's country album quite yet, perhaps we'll have an update once all 200 of those songs are recorded.
