Written in 2009, “Butterfly Effect” is a song about the “butterfly effect” concept popularized by science fiction writer Ray Bradbury: the theory that says small, seemingly insignificant events can have unforeseen and even drastic consequences later on down the line. The term gets its name from Bradbury’s 1952 short story entitled “A Sound of Thunder,” in which time travelers from the present go back in time to the Jurassic period and accidentally kill a butterfly. When they return to the present, they find themselves in an altered parallel reality – the effect of a single butterfly’s death having snowballed over millions of years and changing drastically the course of history on Planet Earth.

In the verses of “Butterfly Effect,” I ponder what I would do if I had a time machine and could change certain events of the past – some of them historical, some of them personal. One of the personal issues I talk about rectifying is the breakup with a past lover (the same breakup chronicled throughout the album Fading Back To Normal). But in the third verse of the song I observe that – via the butterfly effect – that breakup led to me writing “Airplanes,” which led to my first meeting with Atlantic Records, which in turn led to the launching of a professional music career. Ultimately, the chorus of the song concludes that if I did have the chance to change the past, I wouldn’t want to trigger unforeseen consequences…and therefore I’d rather embrace things the way they are.