Todd Butler
God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.
Dag Hammarskjöld
Playing the banjo to the Painted Desert, Arizona, 2022
In the early 90's I met a fellow street performer named Leslie Mildiner while doing the Whistler Street Festival. We became fast friends and he told me about an idea he had to do a musical about money and how debt and credit came to rule and often ruin our lives. I was doing a song at the time called The Rental Blues and we dreamed that one day it would be the cornerstone number of a smash Broadway hit show. That was the seed of what eventually became Debt, The Musical! In 2010 our collective dream bore fruit and our show was staged for ten days at the Firehall Theatre in Vancouver. These songs are the demos the cast used to learn the tunes. The show featured a cast of five along with myself on guitar, Vince Ditrich on drums and Lee Oliphant on bass. Alas, it never made it to Broadway. I made a fun little video of the last song Writer's Lament. It's at the bottom of this page...