Butterfly Dance

Imagine with me for a moment as I reflect on my own experience in life, growing up with dreams and aspirations of being successful with a guitar.

I was merely a young butterfly, not knowing my direction and I hadn’t fully developed my colors. Still relatively new to guitar, a church friend introduced me to the music of guitarist, Phil Keaggy. At the time, I was all about fast riffs and Stevie Ray Vaughn and whatever blues licks I could get my hands under. I had never really listened to “pretty music” and the discovery of Phil’s album, “Beyond Nature “ was quite influential to me. I quickly bought a handful of his CDs via a magazine cd sales catalog and couldn’t wait to dig in. After diving into Phil’s music I discovered how prolific he was and the man could play blues and rock riffs as good as all the greats!

My first year of college was at Eastern Kentucky University and I lived in the nearby town of Winchester. It was close enough for me to make the commute to my classes and the local campus coffee shop, where I discovered a newfound love of coffee and conversations. Eastern Kentucky is full of hills, winding rivers, cliffs, and nature that is quite inspirational and serene. You tend to discover this beauty when you drive the backroads and find new ways of getting to places. Route 388 was no exception, as it followed Otter Creek, a serene creek that would sometimes flood and would be rushing water through its own holler. There were homes and trailers that sat up on stilts, much like homes near the ocean, so that they would avoid flood damage during torrential downpours. This was my daily drive to school and on this commute, I listened, nonstop. I honestly could not wait to start my drive in the mornings and plug the old, square Sony Discman into the lighter socket of my mom’s Pontiac grand prix. It was so back-in-the-day, that we had to order a unique cassette converter that would allow the Discman to be played on the car’s speakers. I would actually drive slowly so that the cd wouldn’t skip and I could enjoy the new discovery of this beautiful Beyond Nature album. I never imagined that I would one day call Phil a friend and collaborator.

Now, I have three releases with Phil. My first release I got to collaborate with Phil on was my tune, Blue Ireland. It’s a track you can find on my Melody Maker album. I was so excited that he agreed to put some parts on there. When he sent me an mp3 mix of his parts, I almost cried, because this dream of working with him was becoming a reality. The next collaboration with Phil came years later. It was with my duo, Allen & Bright, where we created a beautiful instrumental version of the Beatles classic, Let It Be. He played a very tasteful electric guitar on this release.

Now we have this new tune, Butterfly Dance, that we created together in his studio basement. It only took a few hours of time together to create this upbeat musical adventure. When we were listening to this final track, I was thinking of a scene of nature and bees and butterflies flying around in a prairie of colorful flowers. Thus the title, Butterfly Dance.

I hope you enjoy this music and to Phil, thank you for dancing with me! (musically speaking, that is!)