Tré Burt

Tré Burt calls Sacramento home while working as a folk singer and songwriter whose richly detailed accounts of life on the road echo the lineage of American troubadours such as Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and John Prine. Prine himself responded so strongly to the material that he placed Burt on his Oh Boy label and arranged a national release for the debut early in 2020. One year later Burt delivered the follow-up album You, Yeah You. For his third full-length, Traffic Fiction, issued in 2023, he drew inspiration from classic soul and rock instead of his earlier approach.

A taste for restless travel combined with a string of working-class positions—maintenance technician, UPS employee, and airplane servicer at SFO—eventually led Burt toward a life as a folk performer. His loose, grounded instrumental work paired with poetic, clear-eyed lyrics revealed clear echoes of Dylan, yet the nine tracks on the debut album Caught It from the Rye also reflected Burt’s singular personal history. After an initial independent release, Oh Boy Records reissued the project in January 2020. Widely praised by critics, the record was meant to be promoted through an international tour that the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly canceled. During the months that followed, Burt watched global developments and addressed the racial unrest surrounding the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by issuing the standalone single “Under the Devil’s Knee.” He also entered the studio to cut You, Yeah You, which Oh Boy released in August 2021. Burt kept performing live and offered the intense standalone track “Know Your Demons” in 2022 before turning to a new album that deliberately moved away from his folk origins. On singles such as “Santiago” and “Kids in tha Yard,” he leaned more heavily on rock and classic soul arrangements to convey his stories, culminating in the October 2023 arrival of Traffic Fiction.