BUTTERFLIES YE WILL FIND…
New song: 16/01/26
I wrote and recorded a new song, Butterfly at the beginning of the month, being December 2025. The song marks something of a departure or evolution of my approach to songwriting. I have been pulled deeper into approaching composition in terms of modes, keys and scales rather than thinking in chords. This seems to me to present a clearer path towards creating sounds that flow well into one another, through voice leading. Butterfly clashes a pentatonic scale with a shifting bed of strings that move through other moods in a rather brooding or lilting fashion. The result is something of an unsettling, or bracing texture that fits the lyrical content I developed for the melody. I have found writing lyrics to a melody becomes much easier when approaching the notation head on, trialing various words for each phrase, note by note, until the passage pleases me. All of this is to make nothing of the fact that the song began it’s life by way of my idly playing around on the public piano left by Forsyth at Manchester Victoria.
Despite the inclusion of strings in this arrangement, the process of recording Butterfly has now drawn me back into the world of acoustic guitar and folk music. Indeed I have been listening to a lot of John Martyn and Nick Drake in particular. I am keen to explore composing purely in this genre and format. This seems to me to be a worthwhile project to work towards now. It has, after all, been many years since I recorded a full album, having focused on spending what little time I have on short creative bursts working on singles. Now I have a hunger to create something more substantial in this fashion. I look forward to writing this work and sharing updates about the process.
Butterfly will be published on the usual digital streaming platforms, including Spotify and YouTube Music among many others, as of Friday 16th January 2026. I am eager to gather feedback from interested listeners, if they should care to share their thoughts about the song.
I painted the digital cover art for Butterfly in Adobe Fresco. I don’t mind painting digitally. If nothing else it presents a quick and easy way to create artwork rapidly. I should have preferred to paint practically, but the look would have required a setup with airbrushes which eludes me at the present time. I was inspired by Magritte in the visual style. I think listeners will be able to pick out various visual elements from the songs lyrical content, which is something I have been wanting to incorporate more in my releases. Certainly this cover has had much more thought put into it. I hope that a third album will feature a much grander painting with links to the thematic material in the music.
If you care to help the song reach the widest possible audience, please do share it with people you know. I have been surprised with the reach my music has achieved with almost no promotion or advertising. I write songs for my own amusement as I am by no means a professional musician. Sharing them on the internet seemed the obvious thing to do, if for nothing more than to establish an online record of my body of work. Seeing it get played around the world is a bewildering experience. But then I suppose there are people of a similar disposition to myself who find the music helpful to them individually and that makes it seem all the more worthwhile in sharing.