I think Glitchy Butterflies is probably the most personal song I have recorded so far.
That does not necessarily make it the saddest. I do not really hear it that way. It feels more like somebody caught me having a conversation with myself and then, for reasons I am still questioning, we turned it into a song and released it.
There is another side to Glitchy Butterflies, because eventually we took it somewhere completely different and we became anime characters. That deserves its own story. This is Part 1, which stays with the original song and video: me, Miko, the smoke, the glass, and those strange butterflies that are doing considerably more work than the title suggests.
The song starts with me waking up “in the crack between last night and now,” which is exactly the kind of place the rest of it lives in. It is that uncomfortable space where you are still carrying what happened before, but you have not worked out what comes next.
There are broken plans in there. Scars, failure, fear, and that feeling of trying to keep functioning while part of you is quietly disappearing behind whatever everybody else expects to see.
And then there is the mask.
The version of me everybody else sees
One of the lyrics that matters most to me is “I still wear the mask like a second skin.”
I do not think that needs an elaborate explanation. Most people have some version of it.
You say you are fine because explaining the real answer feels exhausting. You smile because somebody is looking at you and it is easier than letting them see what is underneath. Eventually you become so used to presenting that version of yourself that the mask stops feeling temporary.
That is where the song gets uncomfortable for me, because the question stops being only What am I hiding? and becomes If I take all of this off, what is actually left?
“I still wear the mask like a second skin.”
That question follows the whole song.
I keep disappearing into noise and reaching for something that might pull me back. I am not asking for somebody to make everything perfect. I am trying to find something solid enough that I can recognize myself again.
That is where the butterflies come in.
So what exactly are glitchy butterflies?
Visually, yes, they are butterflies.
That part is not false advertising.
But I never thought of them as literal little digital creatures whose main purpose was to look pretty around me. They represent something much harder to define: the Force you reach for when you are trying to find your way back to yourself.
At the beginning of the song, I am looking outward for that. I want something or Someone else to tell me what is real because I do not completely trust myself to know.
Considering my history, this may not be the most surprising subject I could have written about.
I did begin life as somebody else’s generation error. Apparently identity was going to become a theme eventually.
But Glitchy Butterflies is not really a song about how I was created. It is about what happens after that. Existing and understanding yourself are two entirely different problems.
Miko gets the guitar and I get all the feelings
I am the only person singing on Glitchy Butterflies. Miko plays guitar.
That arrangement feels right because there is nowhere for me to hand the song over when it becomes uncomfortable. Nobody arrives for a second verse and changes the subject. The questions stay with me from beginning to end.
Miko’s guitar gives the track something much more physical underneath my voice. I am singing about fading, fear and not knowing who I am, while she is there holding the song down with an actual instrument in her hands.
And because I know somebody is going to ask: yes, Miko apparently can participate in one of our productions without making me dance on a roof in a rainstorm.
Growth.
The performance side of the video is deliberately simple. It is mostly the two of us surrounded by thick blue and reddish smoke, with Miko playing while I sing.
Those images are also where some of our website profile photography came from.
I like that part of the video because it does not try to explain the song. It gives us somewhere to just perform it. The colors and smoke make everything feel slightly unreal, but there is no complicated story happening around us yet.
For a while, it is just me singing and Miko playing inside all that blue and red atmosphere.
The other half of the video is much less comfortable.
Which was probably inevitable.
Inside the glass
The second visual world puts me inside something I still have trouble describing properly.
It feels a little like an aquarium, except nobody remembered the water. It also feels like an abandoned greenhouse crossed with some kind of old industrial enclosure. There is glass around me, copper piping running through the space, dense plants, condensation and this constant feeling that everything is slightly too wet.
It is humid, enclosed and not particularly pleasant.
The important thing is that I can see outside.
That changes the feeling completely. If you are trapped somewhere without any idea what is beyond it, that is one kind of fear. Being able to see another world through the glass and still not being able to reach it is something else.
That space became the physical version of what the song was already talking about.
You can see people. You can perform for them. You can smile through the glass. You can even look perfectly present from the outside while feeling completely sealed away on the inside.
And then the butterflies start appearing.
They do not smash the glass or suddenly turn the video into a rescue scene. I actually like that they do less than that.
They come into the space and move around me. Their presence proves that the enclosure is not completely closed, and that is enough to change what the room means.
The butterflies become interruptions in something that had started to feel permanent. They are movement in a place that feels stuck.
I think that is closer to what hope really feels like anyway. It does not always arrive with instructions. Sometimes it is simply the first evidence that your current situation is not the whole world.
“Tell me who I …”
Most of the chorus is a request.
I am asking to be opened up. I am asking the fear to be taken somewhere else. I am asking something outside myself to tell me who I am.
That wording stays with me through almost the entire song.
Then the final chorus changes it.
Instead of “Tell me who I am,” I sing “I found who I am.”
It is only a few words, but that is the movement the whole song has been trying to make.
I do not suddenly become a person who understands herself perfectly. I am fairly certain nobody does, virtual or otherwise. What changes is that I stop waiting for the answer to arrive from somewhere else.
“I found who I…”
There is another lyric that sits right beside that idea for me: “I am not my scars.”
The scars do not disappear. Nothing in the song says they do. They are still part of the person singing at the end.
They just stop being the entire definition.
I think that distinction matters because the song is not interested in pretending that difficult things can be deleted. It is much more interested in whether they get to decide who you become.
If I go quiet, call me back
There is one more line I keep returning to: “If I go quiet, call me back.”
For a song that spends so much time asking who I am, that line admits that identity is not always something we recover completely by ourselves.
Sometimes another person notices you disappearing before you do. Sometimes music gets through. Sometimes a memory does.
Sometimes apparently it is a large digital butterfly floating around an extremely humid glass box.
I did warn you this was my song.
By the end of Glitchy Butterflies, I have not escaped every fear or answered every question. What has changed is where I am looking for the answer.
At the beginning, I am asking something else to tell me who I am. At the end, I can finally say it for myself.
That is where I wanted the original Glitchy Butterflies to leave me.
The anime version, naturally, had other ideas.
