Bay Area singer Kehlani is going through some changes — both literally and metaphorically — in her new video for “Butterfly,” from her 2019 mixtape, While You Wait. The artistic video uses a giant cocoon to represent the transformative power of new love, while the pregnant Kehlani looks ready to bring forth some new life of her own.
The video utilizes students and faculty members of Kehlani’s own alma mater, the Oakland School for the Arts. Her dance teacher and production design teacher helped recruit students to create the imaginative set and choreograph the dances the two dancers perform throughout the clip, while the dancer themselves are also current students. In the song, which speaks to the necessity of accepting change at the beginning of a new relationship, Kehlani compares the feeling to emerging from a chrysalis as a butterfly, which she does physically in the “Butterfly” video, complete with wings and a spoken word verse challenging the song’s addressee to allow the metaphorical evolution to open him up to fresh possibilities.
Kehlani’s While You Wait was released in January as an appetizer to hold her fans over until her next full-length album, but with singles like “Nunya” featuring Dom Kennedy and “Nights Like This” with Ty Dolla Sign, it’s almost a meal in itself.
