Kaitlin Butts is writing hits and making her CMA Fest debut in 2025

Kaitlin Butts makes her CMA Fest debut

Kaitlin Butts is having one of those stretches that quietly redraws a career. The Oklahoma singer-songwriter is set to make her CMA Fest debut this week, with performances at the Chevy Riverfront Stage and the platform stage at Nissan Stadium in Nashville. According to Billboard, she will also perform as part of the outlet's annual Country Live event in downtown Nashville on June 5. For an artist who watched peers take the stadium stage just a year ago and wondered how she might get there, the moment carries real weight.

"It's hard to process. I'm really excited and did not think that I would ever in my life be able to play a stadium ever," Butts told Billboard. She recalled watching Carter Faith perform at Nissan Stadium during last year's CMA Fest as a turning point in her thinking.

The song that changed everything

Kaitlin Butts had been building a reputation as a sharp, unvarnished lyricist well before the algorithm caught up with her. Her 2024 album Roadrunner!, inspired by the musical Oklahoma!, set the stage. Then "You Ain't Gotta Die (To Be Dead To Me)" went viral on TikTok and peaked at No. 59 on Billboard's Country Airplay chart in July 2025. The song, a rowdy kiss-off rooted in a phrase her mother used, resonated precisely because it was specific and Southern and completely unsentimental about cutting toxic people loose.

Artists including Lainey Wilson, Ella Langley, and Avery Anna amplified it. Butts says the solidarity was not incidental. She describes being told early in her career that women do not support other women in country music, a narrative she now flatly rejects. "The more I have been doing this, the more I have found evidence that none of those things are true," she said.

Women lifting women

That mutual support has taken concrete forms. Langley cast Butts in the music video for "Choosin' Texas," a role that turned out to be a real acting part rather than a background cameo. Butts also appears in a video by Dasha. She signed with Republic Records last year and in 2026 opened more shows for Lainey Wilson, in addition to headlining her own European Cowgirl Experience with stops across the UK and an appearance at London's Highways Festival.

What comes next

The new single "Never Really Mine" was sparked by an incident at Two Step Inn festival, where someone cat-called Butts' husband, Cleto Cordero, the frontman of Flatland Cavalry, while she was holding his hand. Rather than feeling threatened, she found a lyric: "A man that can be taken from me is not mine, was never really mine." The song opens with a deliberately blunt image and moves toward a message of non-judgment, insisting neither type of woman is better or worse.

A new album is in progress. Butts says it will not follow the tight theatrical concept of Roadrunner!, and there are no announced collaborations at this point. Given how the past year has gone, that open space feels less like a gap and more like room to run.