the butterfly graveyard

What is the butterfly graveyard? A collection of fabulous creatures locked inside a glass display case? In terms of music perhaps it’s a place where songs go when not being sung, you could be right on both counts. It is about collections and about songs. A place on the other side of the mirror. Somewhere sad and beautiful. It is also the eponoumous album from a project that sails under the flag ‘The Butterfly Graveyard’. A project located on a musical map somewhere between the Blue Nile and oceans of uncharted waters. To begin then at the beginning, the album was written and recorded as a duo consisting of myself Terence O’Connor and a composer/producer from Cork called Herbie Macken. I had met Herbie a few years previous when he had recorded and produced a different project that I had been involved with. That project came and went but the seeds were there for a future collaboration. The album ‘The Butterfly Graveyard' itself was recorded in a room in Cork City. A spare room connected to a house but still essentially separate. The name on this house was ‘Howth’, named after a coastal town in Dublin. This room then was an ‘island’ off Howth. An island inhabited by the characters and stories that made up ‘The Butterfly Graveyard’. It was ‘Prospero’s’ island, an alchemical room where musical transformations took place. Always dark even on the sunniest of days, the curtains always drawn. The album was recorded in two parts with three years between the commencement and the revisitation. Midway through the first incarnation, Herbie went to America to finish a record with Malcolm Burn. I built a house and moved to the countryside, real life took over and the album stayed on the island for three years. Coming up for air and searching for inspiration I took a road trip in 2008 to go in search of ghosts. Shelley’s ghost to be precise. Percy Bysshe Shelley, the 19th century poetical Ariel. Shelley’s life and death had been a long fascination with me and I decided to make a journey to the last place the poet had lived and where also, he had died in 1822. It’s funny sometimes how we journey back to an earlier source of inspiration, a definite compass point. Travelling through France, Switzerland and Italy on the equivalent of a 19th century ‘grand tour’ the destination was located on the Italian Riveria, just outside Lerici in a little cove named, to my amazement after my namesake ‘San Terenzo’. There I found the ‘Casa Magni’ spotless in its white wash, nothing like it was in Shelley’s day, a nautilus of a house keeping its secrets submerged in the deep. An abandoned boathouse Shelley had lived there in almost complete isolation from the outside world with his wife Mary, his children, his wife’s half sister Clare Claremont and his friends Jane and Edward Williams. Here, for three months Shelley sailed his boat around the islands being propelled by the infamous winds that swept through the area, winds that would ultimately culminate in a storm that would see Shelley drowning at sea at the age of 29. I arrived in Lerici on the 8th of July not realizing that on the same day the 8th of July 1822 Shelley had set sail on his last voyage. (I later find out Herbie’s birthday is on also the 8th of July, some times the stars align). Shelley’s body was washed up ten days later on Viareggio beach, only recognisable from the ravages of the sea by his striped trousers and a copy of Keats poems in his pocket. His body was later burned on a Grecian style funeral pyre and his heart plucked by Byron from the furnace when it wouldn’t burn. When I arrived on the 8th of July 2008 the wind was up with the scent of orange blossom in the air. I spent a week in San Terenzo loitering around ‘Casa Magni’ by day, coming back at night when the air was cooler, listening closely, imagining I could hear the ghosts talking on the veranda above. Jane playing her guitar, Clare and Williams playing chess, Shelley reading his Greeks and Mary Shelley playing with her children. I had been to Rome, the protestant cemetery, seen Shelley’s grave with the inscription from Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’. ‘Nothing of him doth remain, but doth suffer a sea change, into something rich and strange’. On my last night in ‘San Terenzo’ I performed my own ritual, standing on the beach, no funerary oils or Greek incantations, I simply scribbled the words of the ‘tempest’ onto a piece of paper, tore it up and cast it into the waves. My ‘grand tour was over. Back home in Cork I got to work with a few ideas my ‘grand tour’ had conjured up and then I called Herbie. We met and decided to finish the record after a three-year break. Finally I journeyed back to the island, back to the Butterfly Graveyard. Here back on ‘Prospero’s’ island the recording process itself was I suppose, akin to Zen calligraphy, where the stroke of the paintbrush has but one chance to hit its mark, just like the Zen sword master. Vocals were mostly done in one take, capturing the essence of the moment in its purest form. Then layering the original idea. There was a sense of lineage or a handing down that was evident in the writing and recording of the album. The harmonies on the album influenced by Herbie’s time spent with Neil Finn of Crowded House. The ambient landscape a direct lineage handed down from Daniel Lanois to Malcolm Burn and from Malcolm to Herbie. As for the songs, the creatures that lie under this glass case, various emotions flow in and out like waves. ‘Underdog’ evoking anger, ‘Writing you off’ heartbreak at its most destructive. ‘Where the river meets the sea’, based on the story from the Fenian mythological cycle of Diarmuid and Grannine and the various ‘leaba sidhe’ or fairy beds that are found in the countryside around Ireland. And of Course ‘The Butterfly Graveyard’ a song full of sadness. A story of gardens where nothing grows only stones in rows and rows. Life fleeting, the life span of the butterfly, to live for just one day, just a sigh from the heart of the world. Ladies and gentlemen I give you ‘The Butterfly Graveyard’. .. ..