Brian Slattery photo
Sam Carlson and Aug Stone.
“When we were, like, 15, 16, me and my best friend Trig used to go record shopping. And it was weird. Our local record store had this counter with all the cassettes behind it. The goods! You had to ask to see them,” a gregarious voice announces. “Trig was always after Buttery Cake Ass’s Live in Hungaria album. Week after week we’d ask, only to week after week be disappointed. Truth be told, Trig much more so than I. I didn’t know anything about Buttery Cake Ass. But that’s the beauty of music, of any sort of artistic creation — that another’s excitement for it can infect you like this.”
So begins The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass, a 2023 comic novel by Aug Stone about two record fanatics’ search for an album that may or may not exist. Inspired by a teenage prank back in the 1990s at Cutler’s Records and Tapes on Broadway, the novel has now extended its media presence — in a way that fits the theme of the novel itself — by becoming an audiobook, recorded at the Sans Serif studio on Chapel Street by the author, in character as someone else.
In The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass, the two friends’ quest to find a possibly lost album — Live in Hungaria, by a cult band called Buttery Cake Ass — leads them down the rabbit hole of the band’s history, the volatile personal and musical chemistry of its members, and the tantalizing possibility that this obscure group made some of the best music around, if they could only hear it.
After releasing the book in 2023, Stone promoted Buttery Cake Ass with a national tour of book and record stores, heading to Baltimore, Md. and Washington, D.C., covering southern points like Chapel Hill, N.C. and Atlanta, Ga., and going as far as the West Coast, to Seattle and Olympia, Wa. and Portland, Ore. “By the end of that year, I was breaking even,” Stone said, and “I loved it,” even if “I kind of had unreasonable goals as to how many I would sell,” he added with a laugh. “I had a great time hanging out in record stores all day like I did when I was a teenager.”
“I’m really pleased at how Buttery Cake Ass was received and is still received,” he said. “If you’re in a band, you totally get the stuff that’s going on in there.” It found its way into the hands of some prominent musicians, Carlson pointed out, and Vulture had it on its list of the best and funniest comedy novels of 2023, saying that it “reads like a silly version of a Nick Hornby novel, but with more jokes and riffing on the absurdities of masculinity.”
Yet the possibility of an audiobook called to him, even as audiobooks notoriously take a very long time to record. “We kind of knew that, but still weren’t prepared for what ‘forever’ meant,” Stone said, again with a laugh.
But Stone had specific reasons for wanting an audio version of his book. Stone is a comedian who has a character called Young Southpaw, and “I’d always heard it in the Young Southpaw voice,” and he used the voice to do readings while on tour. This makes sense: Buttery Cake Ass is written in a very colloquial, conversational style. Even the experience of reading it feels more like listening to someone talking to you rather than reading elevated, writerly, written prose.
Stone connected with Carlson a few years ago, on the suggestion of then-State House co-owner Carlos Wells, while doing a recording project under Young Southpaw. Carlson had seen Stone at the State House a few times performing as Southpaw and already knew who he was.
Reading the book out loud gave Stone a sense that “this is how it’s supposed to be. This is how I always heard it when I was writing it” (apart from a few visual puns in the book). Plus, he said, “I love audiobooks,” and listened to a lot of them while he was on tour. “It seemed like a good idea going in.”
Asked about the difficulties of recording an audiobook, Carlson said that “we learned about the editing stage. The initial read-through was pretty quick, and about what we were expecting,” even though, because Stone read it in character as Young Southpaw, he could only read for about two hours at a time. “It was a performance,” Stone said, “being in character as Southpaw, doing that voice.” They improvised a few things in the studio as well, including making a laptop stand out of a stack of crates (pictured above) so Stone could have the text within sight while performing.
But in editing, “the chief difficulty” was that “you have to listen to it in real time, multiple times, to see anything that needs to be changed,” Carlson said. This led to recording pieces of it over. Such close listening led to tricks of the ear, too. With “certain words” and even “certain combinations of letters,” Stone said, he had to “accept that that’s how they sound” when he spoke them. “It was definitely so helpful, having Sam there” as another set of ears, Stone said. Doing it by himself “would have driven me insane.”
“It can be a bit like being in a snowstorm or a jungle,” Carlson said. “You start hearing little things that don’t need to be corrected.” For his part, Stone learned that “reading it in my normal speaking voice would have been a lot faster,” he said with a laugh.
Working on their own audiobook gave both Carlson and Stone some sympathy for the mistakes they have found in audiobooks by bigger authors, from mouth sounds to mispronounced words to even paragraphs repeated. “It’s such a vast amount of information to cull through,” and “really doing it right is very labor intensive,” Carlson said.
Then there were interventions from other parts of their lives. Stone “got Covid at least once,” Carlson said, and Stone got a concussion in January that “knocked us out for the winter,” he said. They began recording in August 2023, getting together about once a week, and finished this June.
Stone has used Author’s Republic to distribute the book through the usual channels, from Audible and Barnes & Noble to Bandcamp, except Spotify. (“I refuse to have it on Spotify. I can’t stand them,” Stone said.)
“I’m thrilled with how the audiobook turned out,” Stone said. “It’s exactly how I pictured it to be — all the rhythms, all the jokes hit the way I wanted them to hit.”
Making the audiobook, for Carlson, feels of a part with the theme of the book, of searching for a record that’s extremely difficult to find — so much that the search becomes the point. After all, with vanishingly few exceptions, Carlson pointed out, “whatever anyone makes and puts out, we’re all making the future of lost media. Everything gets lost eventually. Having these different iterations of a book about the search for a piece of lost media is very fun. This deserves to have different footprints.”
The audiobook of The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass is available on Bandcamp, Audible, and most other streaming platforms.