If you loved Michael Jackson’s softer songs, you probably know “Butterflies.” It’s gentle and a little shy, all about that nervous flutter you get when someone you like walks into the room. This Friday it turns 25 years old.
The song came out on “Invincible,” the album Michael released on October 30, 2001. “Butterflies” climbed the charts in early 2002 and became one of his last big hits.
Michael didn’t write it, though.
A young singer named Marsha Ambrosius did. She was a British artist, one half of a duo called Floetry, and back then hardly anyone knew her name. “Butterflies” started as a little demo tape she’d recorded, a song she pulled straight out of her own life.
So who was the “someone” in it? A real boy she had a crush on.
Marsha sat down years later and told the whole story out loud, including the very ordinary place that boy spent his days.
The singer who wrote “Butterflies” tells where her real-life crush worked
“I wrote about a guy who I had a crush who used to work at a McDonalds in London,” she said.
A McDonald’s. In London. That’s the boy who inspired one of the sweetest love songs Michael Jackson ever sang.
Somehow that demo made its way to Michael. He heard it, he loved it, and he brought Marsha in to work on the song with him. She even sings in the background on the finished version, her voice tucked right behind his.
For a singer nobody had heard of yet, that’s the kind of thing you don’t let yourself dream about.
“I believed in that song. I just didn’t know that I’d get Michael Jackson to believe in it too,” she said. “I was just embraced by ‘the greatest.'”
You can hear what Michael did with her little demo in the song itself.
“Butterflies” by Michael Jackson, the full song
Listen closely and you’ll catch Marsha singing along with him, the words she wrote about a plain old crush now carried by one of the biggest voices in the world.
It’s a nice reminder that even the King of Pop leaned on somebody else’s heart now and then. The feeling in that song started with a young woman and an afternoon crush, and Michael just knew a good one when he heard it.
Twenty-five years on, folks still play “Butterflies” at weddings and send it to someone they’re sweet on. Not bad for a tune that began on a demo tape about a boy behind a McDonald’s counter.