Butterfly Child

Biography

Butterfly Child is an Irish group led by singer-songwriter Joe Cassidy. The band is currently based in Los Angeles, California. The band has existed in one incarnation or another since main child joe cassidy began popping up on the music scenes of london, manchester and his hometown belfast, northern ireland sometime around 1991. During the 1990's, they released two mesmerizing albums, 1993’s "onomatopoeia" and 1995’s "the honeymoon suite" and a handful of eps and singles that have left peopl...

Butterfly Child is an Irish group led by singer-songwriter Joe Cassidy. The band is currently based in Los Angeles, California.

The band has existed in one incarnation or another since main child joe cassidy began popping up on the music scenes of london, manchester and his hometown belfast, northern ireland sometime around 1991.

During the 1990's, they released two mesmerizing albums, 1993’s "onomatopoeia" and 1995’s "the honeymoon suite" and a handful of eps and singles that have left people astonished by his uncanny sense of melody and beauty.

his initial offerings on a.r. kane’s h.ark label were mostly comprised of personal works of textural melodies capped off with his majestic sounding sonnets. after the release of each of his first two e.p.’s resulted in consecutive “single of the week” selections in melody maker, he inked a deal with rough trade records who released the “ghetto speak” ep, followed by the much-heralded release of "onomatopoeia" (hit-04) in the summer of 1993.

the praise that "onomatopoeia" received, which included raves from both sides of the atlantic, and a slot on the wire’s top 100 records of the year for 1993, led to a brief relationship with dedicated records who released "the honeymoon suite" in late 1995. "the honeymoon suite" was largely overlooked, but widely praised including being called “the record the term ‘perfect pop’ should have been invented for,” in melody maker.

cassidy first made the trek to chicago in the fall of 1996 after the chicago-based independent label hitit! recordings had licensed his first two albums from rough trade and dedicated respectively, for an action-packed weekend consisting of three days of recording. the recordings from that weekend were originally intended as a chance for joe to document some ideas with an assembled cast of musicians. that chance detonated what would become "soft explosives". cassidy left so enamored with his brief time spent in chicago, that he relocated here in the spring of 1997 to finish what he started…"soft explosives" (hit-24).

joe spent the next year, in and out of the studios at the chicago recording company, pursuing his vision with: four different drummers; one bassists; three different guitarists; a trombone player; a string quartet from the lyric opera of chicago; and engineer chris shepard (wilco, smashing pumpkins, palace).

the result is easily the most ambitious butterfly child effort to-date. combining elements of both the experimentally simplified pop of onomatopoeia; and the lively spontaneity of the honeymoon suite, to arrive at a wholly new place that is refreshing, and unmistakably “child-like”.

having reigned in comparisons ranging from jeff buckley and nick drake to the beach boys and high llamas; and even further-out comparisons as john cage, spacemen 3 and “the red house painters meets haircut 100”; soft explosives shows cassidy moving farther and farther away from comparisons and more and more into his own. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.