Welcome to Buried Treasures, a new series at The B-Side where we dig back and listen to some older songs that we heard on Studio One in years past. Please send your suggestions for Buried Treasures to studioone@iowapublicradio.org.
In a way, the Australian-born, Nashville-based singer-songwriter Butterfly Boucher is the perfect subject for our Buried Treasures series. It's tempting to think of her as a "one-hit wonder", but the truth is she's a life-long working musician who just happened to experience some national success for a while. (She's also never really stopped making or playing music, maintains a strong social media presence and has lots of fans, so the "Buried" part here is a little in question. That's fine. The whole point here is jamming out to a cool song, not semantics.)
Butterfly (her actual first name) Boucher began playing in bands at the age of 15, when she played bass in her older sister's band Eat The Menu: that band later changed its name to The Mercy Bell and released an album in 1996. The Mercy Bell then spent some time in Nashville, Los Angeles and the United Kingdom before Boucher moved to Nashville full-time in 2000. Boucher's solo debut, Flutterby, was released in 2003, achieving some chart success on Billboard's Adult Top 40 with the second single, "Another White Dash":
There's a lot of forward momentum in the music that matches up well with the lyrics, expressing excitement and anxiety about leaving everything behind. It seems pretty clear that Boucher is speaking from personal experience on this song.
Butterfly Boucher's music was regularly featured on several mid-2000s television series, most notably Grey's Anatomy and Charmed. She released two additional solo albums of original songs, and also re-recorded Flutterby for the album's 10th anniversary: that record is called Happy Birthday Flutterby. She also continues to make music with the Nashville band Elle Macho and the Ten Out of Tenn collective. However, Boucher achieved her highest level of mainstream success on the soundtrack to the movie Shrek 2:
Yes, that is David Bowie performing additional vocals on Butterfly Boucher's version of his song "Changes".
