Dad’s ‘Butterfly Kisses’ Zooms Up the Charts

Bob Carlisle, a Nashville songwriter, was just as stunned as the rest of the pop world this week when his debut album soared to No. 2 on the national sales chart--all because of a song he once considered too personal to even put on record.

The album, “Butterfly Kisses (Shades of Grace),” (see review on F6) is a runaway bestseller because of the enormous radio airplay being given the song “Butterfly Kisses,” which Carlisle wrote 2 1/2 years ago for his daughter’s 16th birthday.

Though the singer had no intention of ever making a professional recording of the song, he included the ballad on his 1996 album at the urging of his wife and his record company.

That set in motion a series of events that has made the Santa Ana High School graduate one of the year’s most unlikely success stories in pop music.

“I’m amazed,” says Carlisle, a 40-year-old father of two who has lived in Nashville for the last seven years. “I keep waiting for the alarm to ring. I feel like Bill Murray in ‘Groundhog Day,’ like I’m going to wake up and realize none of this really happened.”

Released 13 months ago on the tiny, Nashville-based Diadem Music Group label, Carlisle’s album sold about 175,000 copies during its first year in release, an impressive figure for a contemporary Christian record but not enough to draw notice outside that field.

By contrast, the album sold nearly 100,000 copies last week, jumping from No. 95 to No. 2 on the pop sales chart behind the Spice Girls’ “Spice” album, which sold about 135,000 copies. (See review in Record Rack, Page F6.)

The pop breakthrough began after Diadem was purchased this spring by Zomba Recording Corp., whose most visible holding is Jive Records, home of such R&B; and rap acts as R. Kelly, KRS-One and A Tribe Called Quest--and now the distributor of Carlisle’s left-field smash.

Zomba’s chairman, Clive Calder, stumbled across “Butterfly Kisses” while acquainting himself with the music his company had just acquired, says Jive’s president, Barry Weiss. Believing the song would strike a chord among fathers and daughters of all faiths, Calder ordered his promotion people to push for airplay on adult contemporary and Top 40 radio stations.

At about the same time, a disc jockey in New York started spinning the record after hearing from a fellow deejay in Tampa, Fla., that the phones lit up every time he played it.

“When WPLJ in New York started playing it, it turned into an overnight phenomenon,” Weiss says. “I mean, people were pulling over to the side of the New Jersey Turnpike and crying in their cars when they heard this song.”

Tracy Austin, music director at KIIS-FM (102.7) in Los Angeles, admits her eyes moistened too the first time she heard “Butterfly Kisses,” which tells of a father’s love for his daughter as she grows into womanhood.

Sample lyrics:

Oh, with all that I’ve done wrong,

I must have done something right

To deserve a hug every morning,

And butterfly kisses at night

“It’s a big tear-jerker,” Austin says. “We get people calling from their offices in tears, and lots of women saying they want to play the song at their wedding.”

Carlisle says the response to his song has been “humbling.”

He wrote it late one night in his home office after rummaging through old photos and realizing that, with her 16th birthday approaching, he and his daughter probably wouldn’t be living under the same roof much longer.

“I just came unglued,” he says, “and the song poured out of me. I wrote it out of my heart.”

His daughter, Brooke, carried the cassette in her pocket and “wore it like a badge,” according to her father, frequently playing it for friends and family.

“It was her song,” Carlisle says. “It was the best way I knew how to express intimately how I felt about her. It wasn’t written to be on my record or anything.”

Now that it’s a hit, others are trying to cash in on the success of “Butterfly Kisses.” Country acts Jeff Carson and the Raybon Brothers have both released their versions of the song. (Jive included a country remix of the song as a bonus track when it re-released Carlisle’s album on May 13.)

“It’s one of those magic records,” Jive’s Weiss says, “but I absolutely would not have expected the reaction to be this fast and this big. It’s like the old days of the record business. It’s pretty exciting.”