Colour Green — Sibylle Baier
Journal post
My relationship with Colour Green
A pervasive lightness that’s deceptively rich and deep
You are walking near the river on a sunny day. The trees cool the air, and their leaves let dappled light dance across the ground. You cross a bridge, and the road forks. You’ve never been down either path. Each has a mystery to it, an appealing quality of lighting. You spend a long time looking down one path before choosing the other.
One of the things Colour Green is about, to me, is the feeling of looking down the other path.
“Deceptively simple” is a bit of a cliché, but I think Colour Green is a true example of it. There’s something really special to me about this kind of music that runs right on the edge of non-descriptness, where it almost feels unremarkable in its initial presentation, but which belies genuine depth if you apply any attention to it.
I Lost Something in the Hills
This is the first track from this album I heard, and I was feeling it right away. If you have not heard the album before, you could definitely check this one out first to get a sense of the album.
Colour Green feels introspective throughout, even when the lyrics are not explicitly talking about introspection. Lines in I Lost Something in the Hills freely range between the inner and outer worlds, but no matter what is being said, you have a feeling from Baier’s delivery that what is being explored first and foremost is an inner landscape.
All the lyrics in this song are great, but the first stanza of the second verse really stands out in my mind, for whatever reason:
I grew up in declivities
Others grow up in cities
Where first love and soul takes rise
There were times in my life
When I felt mad and deprived
And only the slopes gave me hope
I don’t want to add too much to what’s being said here, but what a beautiful, sparse way to paint a picture of what a place means to you. The individual statements are so simple, but they connect so elegantly and say so much together. I really value lyrics that communicate mostly by inference like this.
William
One of several songs on this album that I think instantly just feels perfect. It’s a place, so comfy and familiar, like a broken in pair of shoes.
Part of the deceptive simplicity of Colour Green is Baier’s seemingly plain vocal style: she doesn’t use much vibrato, she sticks mostly to a middle-to-low range, and dynamically she stays quiet. But William is a great example of how much she can do with her voice within those parameters. She renders every little emotional twist of tenderness, rapture, uncertainty, etc. of the song, and all this so delicately that any additional range could destroy it.
William also demonstrates something I love about Baier’s song structure, which largely stems from irregular repetition of phrases.