Spotlight: Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum
It’s the most surprising development,” Michael C. Hall says of the surreal feeling of finding himself in a band at the age of 50. The actor, best known for his work on Six Feet Under and Dexter, wasn’t looking to become one of those celebs-turned-rock stars when he created Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum with drummer Peter Yanowitz and keyboardist Matt Katz-Bohen. But, the connection seemed serendipitous when Hall and Yanowitz met during a Broadway run of Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
“I didn’t make a decision to pursue it,” Hall adds, speaking over Zoom with Yanowitz and Katz-Bohen. “As it did for all three of us, the band just found me. I’ve always, since I was a little kid, done a good amount of singing and been a fan of all kinds of music, but it just never happened that way. My focus was on acting and doing that. It’s a completely unanticipated, surprising development for me—a blessing.”
Initially, the trio began writing and recording music without any real intention of forming a band. Katz-Bohen, known for his work with Blondie, and Yanowitz, who has played in The Wallflowers and Morningwood, wrote some instrumental pieces together a few years ago and didn’t quite know what to do with them. “I played a few of them for Mike, and he noticed there weren’t any vocals and kindly offered to come in and sing on it,” Yanowitz remembers. “It started just as casually and innocently as that.”
“It immediately felt like there was a space to occupy,” Hall adds.
“It felt good. It felt round peg, round hole-y. It was like an unusually good first date.” It felt so good, in fact, that the musicians found themselves having an open conversation and asking each other: “Are we a band? Do we need a name? Should we play a show?”
The ad hoc group eventually agreed to give it a go and played their first gig in 2019 at New York’s Berlin—with Debbie Harry in attendance. From the moment they started collaborating, they all felt a palpable creative momentum, even as Hall was busy with his various acting jobs. Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum’s self-titled EP arrived last April, reflecting the ensemble’s shared love of ‘80s new wave records, as well as the dark synth sounds and dramatic vocals that have long defined that era. And, as Hall puts it, their six-song EP was intended to serve as a “sampler of what we’d been up to until that point.”
He adds: “That EP is representative of the songs that inspired us to make those decisions. [It helped] officially announce that we were a band.”
“We wanted to shy away from having guitars be the focal point,” Katz-Bohen notes of the band’s intention. “We wanted to rock, but without too much guitar. But how do you do that? How do you write something that’s heavy and dramatic without guitars? We had to figure that out.”
The band’s debut album, Thanks for Coming, pushed those intentions even further— and exists almost exclusively thanks to the pandemic. After playing the final show at New York’s Mercury Lounge before the shutdown last March, Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum found themselves canceling a run of LA dates, as well as a planned studio session. Instead, they started writing remotely, occasionally getting together in one of their studios when it felt safe. The album, which dropped earlier this year but was more recently released on vinyl, is both a reflection of the COVID-era and a reaction to it; the bleak headlines the musicians kept reading in the news pushed them to lean away from the darker themes they explored on their original EP.
“The decision to put it together happened during the pandemic, though some of the songs were either in the process of being fully realized or already written,” Hall recalls. “The pandemic just intensified these preexisting trends of isolation and dependence on our interface with technology. All that stuff— it’s not like any of that was new. It just turned the dial up.
“We realized that a lot of our songs were already dealing with a dystopian outlook so, when the pandemic happened, it felt like we got away from that and started writing different songs,” Katz-Bohen adds. “It seemed like everybody was writing pandemic songs and we were like, ‘Oh, shit, we’ve already written those!’”
Ultimately, Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum view the album as just one silver lining of the pandemic. Not only did they manage to create a cohesive, interesting collection of songs during a time when many artists found themselves devoid of creativity, but the band also hired a manager and started their own record label, Morpho Music.
“We found ourselves losing our minds like everybody else and also at a loose end,” Yanowitz remembers. “It just inspired us to keep doing what we’d been doing and finish it. In the same way the band came together [organically], the last year also allowed us to make a really solid record. All of these great things actually came out of this weird year, and we have something to show for it.”
The members of the group are currently mixing their second album, and, although Hall has been in production on the upcoming reboot of Dexter, he promises that he’ll always make time for the project. It’s unclear when Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum will be able to tour, but that might not matter that much anyway.
“This wasn’t a traditional tour/album cycle thing,” Katz-Bohen says. “We’re just creating all the time. I mean, hopefully, one day, we’ll go on a world tour and we’ll be like, ‘Wow, I can’t wait to get back into the studio when we get back home.’ But for now, we exist outside space and time.”
