Colours expresses the feeling of having to let go of somebody who you love in order for both of you to grow. It’s about meeting them again one day far in the future, when both of you are older and wiser, able to experience the beauty of the past with less attachment. I wanted to explore deep nostalgia mixed with gratitude and hope for yourself and the other person.
The song is structured in a series of slightly varying repetitions of the same theme “feel, feel, one day at a time, like flowers we grew, we grew closer”. I see this line as a sort of seed, which germinates into different forms as the song progresses. I was thinking about how flowers are beautiful manifestations of flourishing love. Flowers express the abundance and plentitude of life in a joyful celebration where each is completely unique.
The two plants (and lovers) in Colours observe each other’s roots, leaves and petals, progressively intertwining their individual perspectives into an eternal dance of simultaneous nostalgia and euphoria. The song is deeply sad and full of hope at the same time. Comedy and tragedy coexist in an affirmation of the beauty of the full force of our uninhibited emotions. To quote Timothy Morton: “Comedy doesn’t mean this is funny. Comedy means you allow all the emotions, not just fear and pity, to coexist, kind of like an emotional equivalent of biodiversity.“1 On Colours I want to give a space to this sense of freedom. A freedom, coming from within, to experience beauty in the co-existence of passion, inner growth and the passing of time.
Colours is the first track I have made where the vocals are the prominent feature. At the time I was figuring out how I like to produce vocal parts, and how vocals fit in with the other instruments. For Colours, I bathed the voices in lots of intricate textures that pre-empt and follow the voices. I wanted these textures to feel like the trail of memories and hopes that make up our present moment. These are attached to us, extending far into the past and the future and becoming blurred with distance from the present. But all parts exist simultaneously to create our present voices.
I imagined the two flower-voices of Colours as deities, much bigger than humans. They are made up of the beauty and sorrow of life, woven into intricate and surreal textures. I was thinking of the way that Hindu gods are portrayed with multiple limbs and animal features, expressing their characters and their divinity. That idea mixed with the way AI can make humans look like they’re made of plants.
Halfway through Colours, we hear Erin Snape’s voice singing the perspective of the second plant. I met Erin in a vocal production class while studying at Guildhall. The recording of their voice came out of one of the exercises we did this class. I had originally planned to re-record the vocals, but the way Erin’s voice floats in the synth textures is so beautiful that I just kept it. The stars aligned!
Writing and recording Colours marked a new phase for me as an artist. Having played in a band for the two years before starting the song, I felt an urgency to make a space for the sounds I had been hearing in my head for a long time. This involved exploring my voice as much as synthesizers and free-flowing song structures. Colours was one of the first journeys into this area that I felt comfortable sharing, along with “Reach For The Sun”, the closing track on my debut album “Inside Cycles”.
Writing freely allowed me to be more vulnerable with the kind of experiences I was expressing. I felt like I was able to open up about love, my inner motivations and also a sense of presence in the moment. While I was writing, I put a lot of effort towards creating space to write in long chunks of time, uninterrupted and alone. While I didn’t shut myself off from the world completely, I often spent time walking through forests and fields, meditating and journalling. This took priority over partying and being extroverted. It was at times a very solitary phase, but it didn’t feel lonely. In fact, I felt incredibly alive and rejuvenated by this time. It felt so refreshing to be able to dedicate time to making something deeply, to expressing the experience I was having in that very moment.
It was during this time that I began to understand that artistic expression is so valuable simply because the present moment will never reoccur in the same way. We can choose to create or to consume, and if we don’t create, we will never be able to express that moment again. That’s not to say that you have to express something at every moment in time, or that it should be a stressful or compulsive practice. But this awareness helped me to trust that what I was doing was valuable, and that it is valuable specifically because of all the things that make me unique. That’s a really empowering feeling.
Colours is the first single from Leonard Maassen’s debut album “Inside Cycles”. The track was released 16th February 2024.
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