In this episode of BackStory, New Jersey’s “Delicate Steve” Marion tells us the story behind his song “Butterfly.”

Here is how Butterfly happened. I sat down one day in the place where I make music and took out this small drum machine I bought at a salvation army and turned the speed of it all the way up. The chugging sound it made gave me an inspiration…what I can remember thinking about at the time was an image of being on a train traveling through India….not necessarily me doing that, but I had that image in my mind.

And so I went with that image and added a sitar-sounding drone in the background, then a riff on my friend Christian’s 12-string acoustic guitar. On top of those tracks I made the main guitar line. I wanted to make the sound of it very thin and stringy, but have the melody be lyrical and bouncy. Then I decided on adding chords the second time the melody comes in; the chord sequence I chose happened to be the first take that was recorded while demoing ideas.

I didn’t know what to do for the bridge, but I knew that I wanted the end of the song to return to the melody, but this time be heavier. While trying out a few different things, I had an idea to reprise the main guitar melody from “The Ballad of Speck and Pebble” for the bridge. After that I added a few more tracks to fill out the recording. Originally I tried to get my friends and I to stomp and clap the percussion part that comes in on top of the drum machine at the end of the song, but it didn’t work just right so I recorded it on my friend Mike’s tom drums.

When it came time to name the song, originally I had an idea for a longer title, but I knew that it would make it harder for the song to become memorable and I thought that was important. I forget exactly how “Butterfly” became the name, but I know that it came about by joking around singing lyrics and imagining what the guitar part would be saying.