Love is meant to add colour to the world. Well, that’s the idea anyways at least. Everything gets brighter, ordinary moments become special and suddenly one person occupies a frankly unreasonable amount of your thoughts. Cute, until they’re occupying so much space that there’s barely any room left for you. What happens when someone else’s presence becomes the colour that paints your entire world? That’s the uncomfortable reality explored by Riri Rose in “I Don’t Want That Colour,” her second single and a preview of her upcoming album.
This is an indie-rock song that develops from a seemingly sweet love declaration, but becomes far less than sweet when it begins feasting on your ego. Don’t hear Rose touting a fairy-tale version of love here. Rather, she’s catching us at that breaking point where love becomes obsession and then, soon enough, something destructive. An emotional train-wreck many can relate to, whether it would prefer not to.
The colour does most of the work. Usually it is the beautiful colour of hope, passion, and optimism, but not this time. Instead it seems more like an unwelcome companion, an underfoot extra waiting to submerge all the rest. It’s actually a rather clever way to think about love, at least for these few lines. Love doesn’t always have to be something you don’t have, it can be that very thing which pushes other things away and leaves you with a smaller world to live in.
This perspective imbues ‘I Don’t Want That Colour’ with more significance than just its main analogy. Rose is influenced not just by her personal life, but by fictional environments such as movies, comics, TV and table-top role playing games. She’s a songwriter who uses songs to help her get her head around what are at times conflicting feelings.
Rose is still searching for her sound, but I Don’t Want That Colour hints at the emotional terrain she’s making space for. Love has the power to add colour to the world. But what if that colour’s no longer wanted? What if there’s nowhere left for you? Rose doesn’t have a neat solution; she leaves us perched in that in-between. And sometimes that’s where the best songs take off from.
Follow Riri Rose
About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
