Mac Miller Still Gives Us "Butterflies"

“Butterflies” is one of three previously unreleased songs from the sessions for The Divine Feminine, arriving as part of the album’s 10th anniversary edition. Produced by Taylor Graves with Thundercat on bass, it finds Mac Miller somewhere between infatuation and imagination, singing about nostalgia, desire and the strange unreality of falling for someone. The song eventually lands on an idea so simple it almost feels bigger coming from someone who is no longer here: there is no emotion more powerful than love.

Hearing his voice again sent me somewhere else entirely. In 2014, while blogging for the Recording Academy, I covered Mac at the Hollywood Palladium. He played more than 20 songs to a sold-out room, brought out Tyler, The Creator, picked up a guitar for “Best Day Ever” and tested the building’s structural integrity during “Frick Park Market.”

More than a decade later, “Butterflies” makes that memory feel strangely close. Mac sounds romantic and completely at ease here. The bass rolls beneath him, the trumpet drops by when it has something to say, and his vocal has that conversational ease of someone figuring out exactly what he means while he’s saying it.

I wish there were going to be another ten years of Mac Miller songs we hadn't heard yet.

For today, this one feels like a gift.