Songfacts®:

• Crazy Town lead singer Shifty Shellshock (Seth Binzer) wrote this song about the girl he was seeing at the time. Most of the group's songs were full of macho swagger, which made her wary of Shellshock, so he set out to write something more romantic.
  
  The two were living together at the time, and she collected butterflies. As Shellshock tells it, he was lying on the bed, thinking about what to call his song, when he spotted a butterfly on the ceiling. That gave him the title, and he later came up with the line, "You're my butterfly, sugar baby." He brought the idea to the band, and they loved the idea; they recorded the demo that very evening.
  
  Unfortunately, things didn't work out for Shellshock and his butterfly girl - they were together for three years before a tough breakup.
• The Gift Of Game album, Crazy Town's debut, had been out for a year and a half before "Butterfly" became a hit. It was the third single from the band, which specialized in the kind of rap-rock that was big in 1999 and into the early '00s. Their first two singles were the harder songs "Toxic" and "Darkside," which flopped. Crazy Town toured with Buckcherry, The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Methods Of Mayhem before the song took off.
• This samples "Pretty Little Ditty" from The Red Hot Chili Peppers album Mother's Milk. After writing the lyrics, Shellshock asked his producer to give it a mellow feel similar to "Under The Bridge" by The Red Hot Chili Peppers.
• Crazy Town had two lead singers: Shifty Shellshock and Epic Mazur, the band's founders and primary songwriters. They would typically trade off vocals, which they do on "Butterfly." The pair are the credited songwriters on the track along with the Red Hot Chili Peppers members who wrote "Pretty Little Ditty," which it samples.
• "Butterfly" was a huge crossover hit, earning airplay on rock, pop, and alternative radio stations. Along with "How You Remind Me" by Nickelback, it was one of just two rock songs to hit #1 on the Hot 100 in 2001. Alas, it was the band's only hit (although Jason Aldean had a hit with a song called "Crazy Town" in 2009).
  
  The band released another album, Darkhorse, in 2002, but it flopped. They split up soon after and attempted a comeback around 2007, but didn't get very far. In 2015 they released a third album, The Brimstone Sluggers, which got little attention. Shifty Shellshock, who appeared on the reality recovery shows Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew and Sober House, died in 2024 at 49.
• The song went to #1 in March 2001 and stayed for two weeks. It got a boost from MTV, which featured it on their spring break coverage from Cancun that year.
• The video was directed by a team that worked on the movies The Matrix and What Dreams May Come. It is based on the images from What Dreams May Come.
• Many bands resent their first hit if it gets overexposed and does not really represent the sound of the band, but Shellshock never tired of "Butterfly" and always appreciated how it opened that window to popularity.
• The girl who inspired the song was probably Cynthia Mittweg, who was Shifty Shellshock's girlfriend at the time. She's in the music video.
• Epic Mazur wore a DARE T-shirt in the video. The irony is apparent when you consider that Epic has been to rehab to avoid charges of cocaine possession and continued to smoke marijuana.
• In 2002, "Butterfly" was honored by two different music publishing organizations - BMI and ASCAP - to recognize all the airplay the song received. Crazy Town's songwriters belonged to ASCAP, but the Red Hot Chili Peppers were on BMI, which recognized it because of the "Pretty Little Ditty" sample.