Switched on Pop - Kacey Musgraves Gives Us Butterflies

Episode Date: April 5, 2018

On her single 'Butterflies,' Kacey Musgraves demonstrates a tour de force of songwriting. This song is a wild success because it incessantly reinforces one core emotional concept: that queasy anxious feeling in your stomach. No we're not talking about your leftover lunch, we're talking about love. But this is not just a simple little love song. It is a masterclass of creativity. Musgraves uses every element of music to reinforce her core idea. The lyrics fold back onto themselves with dual meanings as the harmony, melody, orchestration and rhythm all interweave to literally give the listener butterflies. Caution: this song may induce feeling of tender sorrow and longing for mutual crushes and anxious kisses. Songs Discussed:Kacey Musgraves - Merry Go RoundKacey Musgraves - Butterflies Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Oh, Nate, I am excited for this one. Ooh, I'm excited that you're excited. Today we're going to get to talk about Casey Musgraves, who has literally been with us from the beginning of our show,

the very first episode. And I absolutely adore her music. She has a new album called Golden Hour. And today we're going to talk about her song. butterflies. It is a tour de force of songwriting in which every element is splendidly interwoven into a single theme, butterflies. And if listening to the chorus right now doesn't give you butterflies, I promise that by the end of our conversation that your stomach will be churning once you realize all of these just wonderfully, beautifully, intricately tied together

elements of the song. It's so good. Let's take a listen. Now you live in me up Butterflies What are butterflies I mean if you want me to name like a genus I am bereft But these are beautiful creatures That are born from caterpillars

And fill our lives with fragile beauty And serve as excellent metaphors for love And nervousness Yeah And have you ever had butterflies in your stomach I'm not a shame to say that I have. Yeah, you're a romantic too. We all know that feeling, the adrenaline, the anticipation, the unease.

That's exactly what this song is about. I think a great pop song will have a title like butterflies, and that title will be the idea, and that idea will just be throughout the entire song. So we're talking about butterflies, obviously. And so I want to first talk about the sound. The sounds of this song literally give me butterflies. right from the very start, Nate, what happens at the beginning of this song? We have this lovely instrumental intro featuring what I think is banjo and some kind of

strange guitar almost sounds like a sitar. It's a synthesizer. Isn't that a lovely combination country with synthesizer banjo? Yes, that is happening and that does give me butterflies because I've never heard that combination. But I'm actually talking about the very beginning. Let's rewind the tape. Very first thing.

What happens? Aha. Okay. So you're keeping me kosher here. The very first thing we hear sounds like a snare drum hit. Yes. We are caught off guard. We start mid measure.

Boom. Snare drum. Intro into the song. And immediately we are kind of a kilter. We don't know where we're landing. We are caught in Medius race. Do you feel caught off guard? I do now that you've alerted me to this phantom sound that I kind of just pushed to

the outskirts of my hearing, but okay, yeah, I'm with you. That sort of destabilizes us from the very beginning, good. And then fluttering along is this beautiful strumming acoustic guitar. And just chugging along, right? Yeah, that layered in the background, that acoustic guitar, good. Isn't it kind of like a butterfly flapping its wings, just constantly beating, moving through the wind? I know, maybe I'm reaching a little bit far into that one. The sounds of this sort of butterflyness and queasiness continue. When we get a little bit further on towards the chorus, we hear these beautiful, chimie vibes.

Aren't they just sort of icy and ethereal and spacious? Ah, you're suggesting this is a vibraphone we're hearing here, a metallic mallet instrument? That's what I'm hearing. Do you think that's what it is? I'm going to give it to you. I'm feeling very generous today, and we'll go along with all your crazy notions.

Sure. Cool. It's hard to say. Some of these sounds. I mean, I thought I heard a banjo and now you're telling me it's a synthesizer. So I don't know where I am right now. It was a banjo and a synthesizer layered together. So is this perhaps a vibraphone layered with a synthesizer? Oh, I don't know, perhaps. I think it's just a vibraphone, but it's just spacey and gives me butterflies. And I just want to give you two more quick references. Next coming up is this wild thing that happens in the second verse. Listen to the space in this. A clip. Do you hear of color makes me wonder where you've always been? I was hiding in doubt till you brought me out of my chrysalis. Do you hear just at the very tail end of that piece? Do you hear all of that just echoing and reverberation that's going on? Tell me more. In the background there, beneath the drums and the bass.

Oh, that took me a few listens, but I do hear what you're saying now. This is hard to describe, but it's this almost faint sort of echoing, almost like when you listen to a conch shell, that kind of like floaty ocean texture in the background. Yes, I do hear that reverb. I'm ungrounded by these sounds, this etherealness to the track. It's reinforced by the most quintessential element of country music, the pedal steel. Again, whiny and spacey and just washy. That's that instrument that kind of fades in and out and gives that characteristic country twang. Yes, okay, I hear it.

All of these things together, that getting caught off guard, that fluttering of the guitar, the spaciousness within this song, make me have butterflies. The sounds of this piece give me butterflies. Also, that banjo scent thing, I love that. So you're hearing here all these sort of ethereal, floating sonic textures that together create this tapestry. you can imagine a butterfly floating along on a breeze or something. Okay. Yes.

I'm buying, Chuck. I'm buying. Thanks, Nate. If I'm starting to sound as spacey as this song, let's get a little bit more literal. Let's look at how the lyrics literally give me butterflies. What I want to do is I just want to walk through the verse line by line because, oh my gosh, each word is so intentionally chosen.

and self-referential with dual meanings that give you butterflies. So let's start with the verse, first line, I was just coasting. I was just coasting. Never really going anywhere. What a great opening line. What do you read into that line? We're getting an image of our singer sort of stuck in a rut, blazze, going through the motions. And it's almost like the melody reflects that. The melody doesn't go. anywhere. It just kind of coasts along. Yeah, that's beautiful.

And of course, there's a dual metaphor happening. Just coasting, never really going anywhere as in a relationship. But also, the butterfly metaphor is totally appropriate here. The butterfly is just coasting on the wind. Oh, okay, okay. And if you think I'm reaching, let's go to the next lyric. Oh, okay. I was skeptical, but maybe you've got something.

there, so stuck in a web, still not able to kind of break out of these melodic doldrums, so to speak. Also the relationship doldrums, and of course, the butterfly metaphor. Literally caught in a spider web, unable to move. Now, we've gone

from Kosen to being in a web, stakes have gotten worse. We're not in a good state. So let's go to the next line. So let's see if it's resolved in the next line. Well, there's definitely some hope there, because we have this line out of the blue and a new melody appears out of the blue high disgracefully kind of descending down

yeah this is promising for sure and also out of the blue again a double meaning here on one hand out of the blue like out of the sky something falling for her but also out of the blue coming out of a depression out of a funk wow you are you are reading this like ulysses right now this is i love it don't Stop. Okay, what's next? It gets better because moving from the verse into the course, she responds exactly to this line. Okay, that's cool, right. Fell for you, the melody descends down, and then lifting me up, it just rockets back up. It's like we just went through a little valley and are now coasting back to the surface.

Cool. The butterfly is falling and rising. She says, I fell for you. now you're lifting me up. The melody corresponds with the movement of this butterfly, but also lifting me up. We've now moved into a more beautiful, sort of more major tonality.

The melody is rising. There's opportunity. The relationship is literally bringing her up. This is a beautiful moment. Yes, but something, I'm feeling tense now. What's going to happen? I think it only gets better.

Oh, few. But what I love what she does in this chorus is that there are multiple references back to the original verse. So let's just check out this next line about untangling all the strings. Untangled all the strings. Okay, okay, I see what you're saying. She's been trapped in the web, and now this new romance is helping her untangle all

those strings, getting her out of that web. Right, right, setting free her wings. Huh, okay, so there is a lot more butterfly imagery here than I realized. Okay, continue. It is woven in this web. She continues and says, I didn't know him, and I didn't know. know, me, you know, more of a direct reference to the relationship. But again, sort of confusion and off-kilteredness, the butterflies in the stomach.

And she continues into cloud nine. Wait for it? Yeah, and you can really almost picture that cloud up in the heavens as her voice sails into the stratosphere at the same time. Exactly. And as well as referencing back into the blue that she was getting out of, the cloud nine in the blue, all of these words. I'm saying that.

I think they're just so intentional. And then, of course, closing out the most beautiful part of the chorus. Oh, she holds so far into the song to state the purpose of it. You give me butterflies. She doesn't say it at the top of the chorus, not at the beginning of the song, but she suspends us with all these butterfly metaphors and then finally gives it to us at the end of the chorus. That's cool. That's cool.

Really saves it to pack that. punch at the very end of the chorus. Okay. Okay, so this was a long game here. Casey Musgraves really setting everything up very carefully, musically, lyrically, and then delivering that payoff, which feels so satisfying because it ties all those themes together.

Okay, yeah, a lot going on in this track more than I realize. Thanks, Charles. If the sounds and the lyrics of this song are not yet giving you butterflies, I promise you that you will not believe how deep this metaphor goes. It's literally imbued deep within the harmonies and the melodies of this song, which we're going to untangle in the second half of the show. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster?

Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the

women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and Population. beyond the current president.

So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up, instead of the top of,

down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Oh, you're a madman. This is the great butterfly conspiracy of 2018. I picture you in your home with all these like pictures of butterflies and Casey

Musgrave's face like attached to a bulletin board and red twine connecting them. Yes, you insane conspiracy theorists, take me there. Yes. And that leads us right into the harmony. And the harmony,

just like the orchestration and the sounds, the lyrics, it is also going to give us butterflies. The conspiracy deepens. Have you ever felt this just incredible combination

of joy and sorrow every time you listen to Casey Musgraves? Yeah, I know what you mean. It's like the highs always have a little bit of low in them and the lows always have a little bit of high in them.

Absolutely. And I think that that feeling is actually within the harmonic structure of her songs in a lot of her song rating. Certainly one of my favorites is Mary Go Round, which you've talked about on the show previously.

Harmony goes around just like the metaphor of the Mary Go Round. Similarly, I think we have the unease of butterflies in our stomachs just when we hear the very chords of butterflies. Butterflies is kind of ambiguous. Is it a happy song? Is it a sad song?

Just as the feeling of having butterflies is sort of this anticipation, this unknowing, this anxiety, and she produces that anxiety by waffling back and forth between a sort of major tonality and a minor tonality and never giving us just quite enough information to know how we ought to feel. We can hear this right from the beginning. We open up on this beautiful G major chord, one of the happiest of keys. But then she leads us through a bunch of these very sorrowful, minor. chords more minor information than major information. Right, a kind of bitter sweet harmonic progression perhaps. One could think, well, what if she had written this slightly differently and started on the minor and then moved to the major? It would feel as though there's almost too much resolution.

Right, it's a little less ambivalent than the existing progression. Exactly. And you know how we talked about how she builds anticipation for that. that marvelous moment where she reveals the feeling that she's got the title of the song, The Butterflies. Oh, yeah. She, in a similar way, builds anticipation through the chord progression. When we are in the verse, we hear these minor chords. However, this progression is actually a cropped, a shortened version of the larger progression, which reveals itself in the chorus.

So in the verse, we have this happy little G major chord. we start on. You move to an E minor, sad, B minor, sad and ambiguous, and then it goes back to the G and just repeats in the verse. But when we move into the chorus, all of a sudden, now we're getting more information. It goes from the happy G through the sadder, E minor, and B minor, and then moves to a D major and resets our expectations that we're going to be home in this happy place, maybe going to Cloud 9. So basically what's going on here is that that cropped version of the chords extends itself in the chorus to reveal really what's going on. Rather than being sorrowful and stuck in a web, if you will, there's opportunity that the butterfly is starting to

flutter its wings from fly away. Oh, okay, so the harmonic progression expands from the verse to the chorus to include this additional major chord, sort of subtly cluing us in as listeners that this story is going to have a happy ending. Sometimes you get butterflies when you're anxious about something going wrong, but they're also an indicator of something about to go really right, right? When people have butterflies just before a kiss. That's, isn't that pretty? That's next level, Charles. I hear it. Indeed. So we said that the feeling of butterflies is in the harmony, and it's also built right into the

melody. You captured some of it and some of your thoughts earlier, but I want to take a second and just focus in on specifically the notes that are going on this melody, because I think it gives us so much information about the feeling of flying like a butterfly. You establish that in the verse, the melody's pretty banal. Not much going on. And it's kind of low and not moving much, yeah? But when we get into the chorus, all of a sudden, we start to soar. Kind of.

Because this is a beautiful melody. It bases itself all around this low note, this D right here, right? At the bottom of this melody, Casey keeps retreat. turning to this low note and then rising up above it and then falling back down and then rising back up. Yeah, I guess. You know when you watch a butterfly on the wind how they don't fly like a bird, but rather they sort of shoot up and then they sink and they shoot back up and they sink back down. Yeah, yeah, okay. I'm with you. I think the melody is sort of following that same sort of structure. Quickly flutter its wings falls back down. Futter its wings falls back down.

I'm trying to make a ridiculous extended metaphor of how this melody is actually a butterfly. flying on the wind. It gives me butterflies, especially at the very end. When she sings, you give me butterflies. Yeah. Because rather than landing on our home key,

she shoots above it and kind of goes beyond. She says, You give me butterflies. And it's kind of shoots up and goes, rather than landing on the home note of G, she shoots back up into the B and sort of flies off. So what you're saying is she could have resolved, that melodic phrase to the home note of G.

Exactly, which would have sounded like this. And instead, she takes that note, she goes to the G and then sores beyond it. Okay, I'm with you, like an unruly butterfly. Yeah, you know what? You're right on the precipice, but I'm going to say it's all in bounds. I'm buying. Maybe it sounds ridiculous that I'm trying to tie this melodic movement

to the actual movement of a butterfly. But as a listener, not getting that resolution and instead shooting beyond it gives me this sense of unstableness. I'm a little bit just not grounded. And that ungroundedness is that feeling of butterflies.

Like, she's in the construction of this melody. If you're really listening to it, you get butterflies in your stomach. I think this is magical because the song is not just about butterflies, both the feeling of being in love and then the actual literal butterfly and the metaphors of the butterfly,

it actually evokes the feeling of butterflies in your stomach when you listen to it. The very first time I heard this song, I just loved it. And I was fluttering that you can actually take the song and make someone feel the way that you are feeling. That's amazing. Mine lever smetling.

You are delightful, Charlie. You said the word butterfly more times than I think I ever have in my entire life more than anyone but an entomologist might. And yet, I think it was for good reason. And I like what you said is it's not, like outwardly, it seems like a really happy song. But there's also these little glimpses of melancholy in there

that are what make it so compelling. If it was just the major chords, if it was just, you know, the melody landing on the tonic note G, like maybe it wouldn't land in the same way. it's because it's a little sad and it's a little like floaty or what have you, that draws you into it. Unstable, yeah. Well, and it creates the feeling of butterflies.

Yeah, don't say it. Don't say it again. No, you're cut off. Mariposa? Yeah, yeah. Can I tell you? So I open our show by saying that there's just not any one thing that makes this song great, but it's just all of the choices that the songwriters made to reinforce the core theme,

the title of the song. Do you mind if I just give you three tiny short examples of other things that will blow your mind? I will allow it. Okay. You know, we love talking

about text painting, text painting, the words, the music, they match. You caught one of them in the chorus melody in which things go high and then they go low. But there's some other subtle ones,

which I think are just so beautiful. So get this. You know when we were talking about how she sings about being stuck in the web and then the lover helps untangle all the strings that were caught in the wings. Right. Take a listen to this and tell me if you can hear that text painting in this moment.

Do you hear an entangled, suspended harmonies that weren't anywhere in the song before this? I see. So the vocal harmonies there have some dissonances that are then resolved on the word untied. Untangled all the strings. The harmonies all recede, and it's just her. singing free. Yeah, okay, let me see what else you got. I'm hesitantly accepting.

Okay, there's a really obvious one, and it's just very pleasant. In the second verse, she sings about coming out of her chrysalis. Oh, right, right, right. So are you referring to the little, like, subtle harmony on the word chrysalis? Yeah, it's like a crystalline, folk coder sound. it. Actually, I think when I first played this for a friend, they were like, is that daft punk? I was like, no, no, it's not daff punk. Is that image in heap? No, that's not image in heap. That's Casey Musgraves and a crystalline little beautiful harmony reinforcing her chrysalis.

Oh, man, yeah, but a chrysalis is not a crystal. Okay, I mean, let's just say it's a beautiful moment. It was an intentional moment. That doesn't happen anywhere else in the song. They wanted to reinforce that chrysalis. No, it's certainly intentional. I just don't know that you have successfully proved that that vocal technique communicates the essence of the butterfly's metamorphic cycle. But yeah, okay, go on. I certainly don't mean to imply that all of the choices here that are being made or chosen just as I am hearing them. Rather, these are the things that I'm hearing in the song and they literally give me butterflies. Like, I've listened to it, I think only like four or five times in preparation to talk about this in the show.

And just all of these things evidenced themselves to me gave me that shaken, unsturdy feeling of, I can't say the word anymore. And I just, man, I'm absolutely in love with the tune. It just feels so perfectly composed to me. I love it. You're shook all right. And how are you feeling? I feel great myself.

And whether I agree with all of the things you've uncovered here, I don't know. But I love the interpretation. And what's the most beautiful thing about this song is that it, offers so much to read into it. In some ways, again, it seems like on the surface, just a simple love song, but as you start to dig into it, no, there's so much subtlety and complexity here and surprising ambivalence. So I'm glad you took us through the BFs of this piece.

If people can write love songs, which continue to surprise and amaze us, that's a beautiful thing. Yeah. Never enough. Nate, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for entertaining all of my whimsy. It's been really fun. Anytime.

This episode of Switched on Pop was produced by me, Charlie Harding. And me, Nate Sloan. All of our editing, mixing, mastering, the dark arts of things that I don't understand are done by the great Bill Lance. Our design is done by Luke Harris, and we are a proud member of the Panoply Network. Reach out to us on Twitter at Switchedon Pop

or shoot us an email. contact at switchedonpop.com. You can find more episodes wherever you like to listen to podcasts or on our website, switchedonpop.com. We'll catch you again in two weeks and until then. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.