After several dense recordings of Butterfly For A Night, I wanted to make a stripped down version of it.
I worked on this song together with songs like Behind Bars, Escaping Ixtlan and Part Of Your Compilation.
In this project, I’ve obviously had many small goals, or mini projects designed to make me able to complete this five-year-long music project.
The above mentioned songs had the work title “project impossible” together with 10 other songs (like A Million Ways, Des Guise In The Skies, Exciter and Keep Your Arms Open).
Not that these songs were more impossible to produce, than the others. The working title refers more to a time in the project, where it was crucial that I had a high success rate with the songs that I produced (in order to not run out of time and songs) with the deadline of 14 days breathing down my neck.
The problem was that I would not release anything that I didn’t feel was great and had its own uniqueness and purpose, both on its own and in the project.
If I felt at any point that a song would not be good enough I would need to rearrange or recompose it, or drop it, which ultimately would lead me to cancel the project, if necessary.
In a group of songs like this, some songs had been worked on for over 10+ years, while others were recomposed in a week. And arrangements varied from extremely complex to super-mininalistic.
But this made it refreshing and inspiring to work with the music, as the songs varied so widely from day to day, and sometimes from hour to hour.
Which of course, was the point with this project.
Since I have composed music as long as I remember, I easily get bored if I have to do the same thing over and over again. It’s particularly boring to do what everybody else does.
So productions that reminds me of what other people are doing (and many would call mainstream) are naturally scrapped. Or in other words, considered a cliché.
For many rockers “Butterfly” is probably considered a cliché by itself (like most ballads). For me, it would be a cliché to orchestrate it too much, as it probably came from my lifelong love for classical music.
I wanted it to be broken, more realistic and therefore not too dense. So it was recorded live with an acoustic guitar, upright bass and a voice.
It was a simple demo that trumped bigger productions of the same song.
If the song had belonged to another group of songs in the project, it is possible that the outcome had been different, but I like to think that it would not.
Visual art: Nicholas Archer