So You Want to Find and Download After The Storm by Nick Butterworth
I know exactly how frustrating this is because I spent way too long trying to track down a clean, high-quality version of this track. Nick Butterworth is a Manchester-based artist who gained attention after appearing on BBC's X Factor back in 2011, and "After the Storm" is one of his most recognizable songs. It's a straight-ahead pop-rock track that got some radio play but never became a massive chart hit. That means it's not always easy to find on every platform, and you'll run into a few problems if you're looking for something decent. The song is available on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube. I tried downloading it from a third-party site last year because I wanted an MP3 for a project I was editing, and what I got was a compressed, low-bitrate rip with someone's voice mumbled over it at the beginning. Don't bother with those. Just stream it through a legitimate service. If you need offline listening, Spotify's Premium download feature works fine, and the audio quality is acceptable at 160kbps AAC. For buying a proper digital copy, iTunes and Amazon Music are your best bets. You'll pay around ninety-nine cents per track. The files are DRM-free AAC at 256kbps on Amazon and 256kbps M4A on iTunes. That's good enough for almost any use case. I keep a folder of Butterworth's work on my laptop and the iTunes version is the one I actually listen to, not the Spotify cached versions.
If you're trying to find the original studio recording versus a live version, that's where things get messy. There's a live performance from the X Factor that circulates everywhere, and it sounds nothing like the studio cut. The studio version has a cleaner production, a more restrained guitar tone, and Butterworth's vocal is tighter. I confused the two early on and tried to reference the wrong one in a presentation. Took me twenty minutes to realize I'd pulled up the televised performance instead. One thing worth noting: Butterworth released an album called "Dogs" in 2013, and "After the Storm" appears on that record. The album itself is solid but deeply underappreciated. If you're just going to grab the single, you're missing half the context. The album tracks surrounding it on the tracklist — specifically "Paper Planes" and "Mossley" — give you a much clearer picture of what he was actually aiming for sonically. The production is warmer than any one hit single would suggest. I also ran into a licensing issue once when I wanted to use the song in a video. Even though it's a relatively obscure track, the publishing is still actively managed. I contacted the rights holder through ASCAP's database and got a quote within a week. It wasn't cheap, but it was straightforward. Don't just slip it into a YouTube video and hope for the best. Content ID will catch it, and the strike hits harder than anything.
The song runs about three minutes and thirty seconds. Standard structure, verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-outro. Nothing experimental. If you're looking for something that pushes boundaries, this isn't it. It's a competent, well-crafted pop song from an artist who knows his craft but hasn't quite broken through to the next level. The vocal performance is the strongest part. His tenor range comes through clearly without any of the auto-tune gloss that's crept into so much of this genre since 2011. My advice: find the studio version, add it to your library through a legal, and if you're serious about his work, listen to the full "Dogs" album in one sitting. The songs gain momentum when you hear them in sequence rather than isolated. That's the version I keep coming back to.
