My first completed song - Butterfly

Hey.

I'm doing some songwriting behind the scenes right now, so I'm gonna use the next month or so to revisit older songs - almost all of them odes - and talk about how they came to be written.

Here's Butterfly.  It's the first song of my own that I ever finished.  I started out as a fair enough singer, aspiring writer, and one terrible guitarist.  Roommates would suffer as I plunked one or two strings over and over, pining over some crush or another.  They were always named Heather, too.  A whole flock of Heathers - Heather with the pixie brown haircut and the sexy Boston accent who abbreviated EVERYTHING... even her "vag".  This was 1998, way before that little diction tic came into vogue.  Or Heather, the alto in a college a capella group who had sad eyes and a welcoming grin.  Or Heather the RA, who smelled like jasmine and cactus blossoms.  All those Heathers....
 
 So, I finished no songs on my own in college.  Collaborated on a bunch of music with a ragged, iconoclastic guy named Andy Ben.  I'd sing and write lyrics, he'd strum.  At first, the goal was to help him score with this adorable Japanese model who studied theatre with us, but when that didn't pan out, we just wrote songs to write them.  Or, we'd have crazy adventures all over Los Angeles.  Ones that started that with him showing up unannounced in my apartment and ended at a protest rally dodging broken glass and riot cops deep in the heart of Compton. 

I finished college with no prospects.  I was chubby and no grad school wanted me for their theatre programs. Twelve dollars in my bank account.  Knew I had to head back home for a spell.  And it broke me.  To realize that I wasn't able to continue doing theatre and music and writing for a while until , as Andy once said while high, "I cleaned my spaceship" .  Normally, I intuit that odd phrase to mean tidying up my place.  But I felt it resonated so clearly with this point in time - finding survival work, saving up, and getting out of Modesto, CA for good.  Make my own autonomy. 

So, while I was back home for seven months, I lived in a small, bare white room with my family.  For the first few months, I did three things:  taught myself to juggle, I listened to Phillip Glass constantly, and I kept playing terribly at guitar.  Those arpeggios felt so welcome - a drone of music that I listened to for hours on end. And somewhere, amidst this crazy behavior, I stumbled upon a series of notes which haunted me. I kept playing them again and again, staring at the wall until my fingers bled.  And I wrote this song.

21 years old.

When it was finished, I played it for my father.  He nodded, and in his slow, sure way, he drawled, "Well, son, that sure is pretty.  But it'll never be on the radio"   He was right.  No offense.  It's not poppy like a lot of my modern work.  Verse, bridge, chorus, wash, repeat.  It was meandering, dream-like.  It sounded like a vulnerable, scared animal.  Which I was.

Plus, as I wrote it, I thought about the women who always strike my heart.  I distrust constantly smiling women or obscenely attractive women at first.  It's a prejudice of mine.  But, if I see someone or in time get to know someone beyond the smooth pallor of their skin or the glint of their toothy smile and I see a real, strong woman who has been slapped hard and often by this ramshackle life, and has triumphed over such an ordeal, I love them. My heart trembles. I want to share time with them.

And, this habit of mine has had some side effects.  Sometimes I try to over help them, or end up accidentally being paternalistic. Sometimes they push away and don't fancy me back.  Sometimes they turn out to have a serious shoplifting habit.  No two people are the same.

Here's the song and the lyrics:

Wicked little thing
your face, a box of questions
I want to
I want to
wrestle you down
and give you a name
I want to
I want to
beg let me in til you got no room
but that would seem immature
I don't want to seem
immature
lord I'm always so goddamn immature
you too
you look battered up
knuckled down
looking over your shoulder
you're just tuckered out
caving in
fighting time
you're just growing old
growing cold
flailing quietly
you're just worn out space
human race let you down
you wicked little thing
so why i am i still chasing you
you just flitter away
flitter away
i have no weapons
yet you look at me like I'd hurt you
you think you're still the girl you see
some bloated underestimated bunch of skin
nothing safe but dreams you dream
you hurt
because you're beautiful
you hurt because you're beautiful
you are so beautiful
you hurt so much
listen to me
you have grown
you have grown
you have grown
you are lovely
the jig is up
you butterfly