Videos

The Voluntary Butler Scheme – Quinzhee (Building Us A House Out Of Snow)

• 17th Dec 2012

‘Quinzhee (Building Us A House Out Of Snow)’ is the festive Beach Boy-esque new single from The Voluntary Butler Scheme’s winter collection, taken from the forthcoming album ‘A Million Ways To Make Gold’, due for release in March 2013 on Split Records.

It’s a winter warmer tune about an ill-feted ‘house melt down’ kind of love scenario and sounds like a Christmas record recorded in the sun, which effectively it is. The Voluntary Butler Scheme, aka Rob Jones, wrote the song on a hot August night when sleep was evading him. “I whispered it all in to my phone and then worked out the chords the next morning. I played it and thought ‘oh that sounds like Christmassy kind of August accident’. Because the lyrics fell out so easy I felt the need to do some back-research in to a title. I like the word and my surname is Jones so it made me think of what a great stage name Quinzhee Jones could be…”.

The b-side is a tender rendition of the beautiful country ballad ‘That’s How I Got To Memphis’ by Tom T Hall. Rob had come across the 12″ in a boot sale and loved it so much he decided to cover it.

Both tracks feature French horn, trumpet, saxophone, guitar, bass, drums, piano and rudimentary violin all played by Rob who says “They’re instruments I’ve wanted to learn for ages and my ethos behind learning them was ‘well if a primary school kid can play it, it can’t be that hard’. So i just started buying a load of instruments and self-jamming with them till a song popped up.”

The Voluntary Butler Scheme will be showcasing both songs in December when they support Slow Club – catch them at the following dates:

16th December – Sheffield (Social Club)
18th December – Brighton (The Haunt)