Behind The Tracks: Eloah - Caterpillar (Single) (2023)

Hello, my name is Elmar. I write and arrange most of the songs for our band ELOAĦ, and I would like to share some insights about our latest single, "Caterpillar", and tell you a bit more about how this song came to be and what it is about.

I will never forget the moment when the song came to me – literally speaking. I was sitting in my living room, playing around with my guitar, as I often do, having nothing in mind but feeling a certain bliss, a kind of gratitude for being alive. I had just experienced what John Strelecky would refer to as a “museum day” - a day filled with moments worth being exhibited in a museum after death, to be shown and remembered for eternity, as it is so beautifully explained in his book “The Big Five For Live”. And perhaps this beautiful metaphor actually became partially real, as this song is an attempt to describe this unparalleled joy I had experienced then. I could feel its warmth spreading through me like a golden glimmer as the song took shape when I played it the first time. I immediately felt that the lyrics had to be innocent and child-like, as the emotion they were supposed to express were coming directly from my inner child, which was still dancing in blessedness, drawing joy from the lingering impression of the museum day.

As I normally do in these cases, I started writing down the lyrics moments after I played the first notes. I vividly remember a feeling of amused bewilderment when the words “If I were a caterpillar crawling up an apple tree” escaped my pen. "Where is this going?" I asked myself. Is this going to be a children’s song? So, I continued and thought: Now, what would I do if I really were a caterpillar? Well, first, I would try not to get poisoned, so quickly the words “I’d avoid the vermin killers” formed in my mind, making me smile as I wrote them down. Then, the universe took over again, and it made me look up the word for the science of butterflies because I had the feeling that my “caterpillar” would not stay a caterpillar forever. Knowing about its evolution, still having the illustrations of a children’s book in front of my mind's eye, I added the words “study lepidoptery,” which made me smile even more because now I understood the deeper meaning of the song: transformation through love.

The rest of the words and music materialized with ease. Naturally, the caterpillar would dream about a flower that he could never reach in his current state, only admire from afar. It would take a miracle, his transformation into another being while essentially remaining the same at the core, to be able to reach that flower. And naturally, the second stanza would be from the perspective of the flower. When I wrote the words “I promise I will come for you as soon as I’m a butterfly,” tears rolled down my cheeks. That was the core message of the song. Somehow I was in the middle of an inner transformation, and whether it would take a real “rebirth” into another life or a significant transformation in this one, my soul desperately needed to grow wings to experience more “museum days.” A miracle needed to happen, but the beauty of it was that this miracle, like the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly, was apparently a natural part of my development. Like Albert Einstein said: "There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle, or you can live as if everything is a miracle." I choose the latter.