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I want to turn this up until my ears bleed.
Butterfly's music is fresh, vibrant, beautiful, powerful, passionate--and she rocks like a sunavabitch. I know, I saw two of her shows some months back at the now defunct Slow Bar in Nashville, front and center, to say the least. She plays the beejesus out of the bass and sings strong and pure, unaffected, and moves like Athena.
The record is engineered and produced by Brad Jones. (His name comes up in Puremusic with well-deserved regularity.) Even from as huge a fan as I am of his producing, this is some of the best work I've heard. But I'm sure Brad would say, first and foremost, that it's a portrait of the extreme talent and energy of Butterfly. She wrote all the material and plays bass, guitar, and keyboard. The songs are fabulous--the melodies and the changes, incredible! The words are great: pop but still giving, revealing. The artist is so precious, just a radical turn-on without being treated as sexy. (She's totally hot, but is not so portrayed--I don't know where they got that outfit.) My point is that nobody is leaning on that obvious and very available angle. It's about the music, which is first rate.
The middle child of seven Australian sisters, her dad was a musician and both parents were free-spirited home schoolers. When dad's stardom bid came up short, the family packed it in for the Outback.
Off the beaten track herself, young Butterfly (and yes, that appears to be her given hippie name) was already multi-track recording on various instruments at 10. She moved on, through family, to Europe a bit later, settling in England. If liner notes tell the tale, she seems fiercely family-oriented and close to her friends and support system.
Butterfly certainly ran into the right recording situation with Brad Jones and Robin Eaton at Alex the Great Studios. They'll try everything and know how to pull the best out of an artist. We look forward to profiling Brad in vivid detail in our upcoming Producer series of interviews, just up ahead.
We're crazy for this record. Love it, to death. Great songs, played with heart and reckless abandon, by a superb talent. Buy it, here. • FG
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