Ode To Daughter’s Love Leaps To No. 1 On Charts
Bob Carlisle was up late one night, alone with the darkness and a cedar chest full of old photographs. He sat hunched over the pictures of his daughter Brooke, just turning 16 then. Daddy and baby, Daddy and his girl, Daddy and almost a woman.
“I realized I wasn’t going to have her much longer,” Carlisle said yesterday from his Nashville home. A song poured out of Carlisle that night, a song he gave Brooke as a 16th-birthday present.
That song, “Butterfly Kisses,” a sappy but powerful ode to a daughter’s love for an imperfect father, has stolen the hearts of radio listeners with a force rarely found in pop music these days.
The album that features “Butterfly Kisses” has been around for more than a year in Christian bookstores, but in the past 10 days it has crossed over to the secular market, leaping to No. 1 on the adult contemporary charts in its first week of airplay.
Billboard magazine dubbed the song a “heatseeker”; Radio and Records said it’s made “one of the swiftest climbs” up the charts.
More than half of the leading Top 40 stations in the country have already begun to play the tune even if they had to go out and buy a copy from a Christian outlet. This week, a new version remixed with a Nashville sound goes out to country stations.
“It’s one of those records you play in the music meeting and you just go ‘Wow,”’ says Randy James, program director at Washington’s Mix 107.3 (WRQX-FM), which is playing the song up to five times a day.
“If you’re a dad, this song is going to hit you. Hard. And it’s getting to women even faster - usually on the first listen.”
The lyrics are not overtly religious, nor is Carlisle much of a preacher, even if he is a 15-year veteran of the contemporary Christian music circuit.
“I don’t try to cram ideals down anybody’s throat. I like anger and rebellion in music, too. But every once in a while, it’s good to have something that’s good and right.”
It says so right in the song:
With all that I’ve done wrong
I must have done something right
To deserve her love every morning
And butterfly kisses at night.
The song is unabashedly sentimental as it traces “Daddy’s little girl” from childhood to sweet sixteen to the day “she’ll change her name, she’ll make a promise, and I’ll give her away”:
Butterfly kisses after bedtime prayer
Stickin’ little white flowers all up in her hair
“Walk beside the pony, Daddy, it’s my first ride.”
“I know the cake looks funny, Daddy, but I sure tried.”
A pop explosion of this kind happens through a delicate blend of marketing, serendipity and that elusive grail, the actual public embrace of talent.
The way Carlisle tells it, his record was enjoying its success inside the sheltered but still billion-dollar-a-year Christian music industry, when suddenly a secular radio station program director heard the song and put it on the air.
“People just started calling the station like crazy and pulling their cars over to the side of the road crying, and we didn’t even have the records out in the stores yet,” says the 40-year-old singer-songwriter.