Part 2
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Her husband Ben, played by Geoffrey Palmer, is decent and dull in exactly the proportions that make a marriage safe and airless. Her son Adam, played by a very young Nicholas Lyndhurst, is a walkout in a leather jacket.
And hovering over all of it, every single week, is the theme song — the softest recording imaginable, about a feeling that cannot be held.
Put the song against the show and it becomes devastating. Here's a woman who has everything the song promises and feels none of it. The butterfly lands on the wrong window and stays there.
That's what a great theme song does. It doesn't describe the show. It argues with it. And a good theme song wins the argument only sometimes, which is what keeps you watching.
What a Song Looks Like
Listen to the images like they were shots in a sequence, because that's what they are. This lyric has a shot list, and it's beautifully edited.
The multicolored moods of love are like its satin wings. That's a color grade. The song opens on something iridescent and wide, and then refuses to hold still for more than a second.
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Your touch is soft and gentle. Your kiss is warm and tender. That's a close-up. Hands, then mouths, and nothing else in the frame. The camera doesn't care about the room they're standing in.
Your laughter brings me sunshine, every day is springtime. That's a location change. We've moved outdoors, into weather, into light. The scene just got bigger without anyone saying where we are.
And the last one — together we belong like daffodils and butterflies — is the pull-back. The crane shot. The two of you suddenly small and part of a garden that was there the whole time, doing its thing without you.
Six or seven passes at this, and no story. Just the same shot list, run twice, with the colors turned up. On paper, it shouldn't work.
It works because the melody never gets louder. The song never struts. It just keeps describing the same impossible thing from a slightly different angle, the way you do when you're in love and you can't stop telling the same story to different people.
Why It Still Opens Shows
Back to the ritual. Why does a performer start the night with this one?
Because it's an open palm. It says: I'm not going to blow your hair back first. I'm going to warm the room up, and then we'll see what we've got.
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Every setlist is a thesis about what kind of night this is going to be. Open with a banger and you promise adrenaline. Open with a ballad and you promise honesty. Open with this, and you promise something rarer — sweetness with a splinter in it.
And there's the practical magic: the room already knows it. If you've heard it once, you can hum it. The butterfly invites the crowd in without asking them to do anything except sit there and soften.
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Then, near the end, the song does the thing all great standards do. It repeats itself back to the top. Love is like a butterfly. A rare and gentle thing. Same words as the beginning.
Different person singing them, though. Because the crowd has moved in the last three minutes, and so has the singer, and the words land somewhere slightly new.
The Return
Which brings us back to that first chord.
The song started as a promise made to a room. The singer said it out loud — you wanted all of it, here it is — and then delivered the whole thing, verse by verse, until there was nothing left to give.
Nothing changed in the room. Nobody got up and left their life. Somebody's drink went warm. Somebody remembered who first played them this song, and didn't say so out loud.
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But for three minutes, everyone in that room was looking at the same small thing and agreeing to call it love. That's not nothing. That's basically the entire job.
And that's what the song is really about. Not butterflies. Attention.
The butterfly is just the excuse to stop and look at something that will not stay long enough to be looked at properly. Every love song is a race against the thing it's describing.
Here's the trick of it, though. A song that says love is like something fleeting has been on the charts, on the radio, on television, and in the opening slot of live shows for fifty years. It outlasted everything it compared itself to.
Rare and gentle things don't usually survive that. This one did. Which means either the butterfly was never the point — or the butterfly was always tougher than it looked.
So the next time a band opens with something soft and strange instead of something loud, stay for it. You're watching a performer decide what kind of night this is going to be, and betting the whole room on a feeling.
Next in this series: the opener that does the exact opposite — all noise, no butterflies — and what its first ten seconds tell you about everything that follows. Bring a jacket.
