The Color Spectrum
“The human voice is overrated,” goads the voice inside my head. It’s not a kind thought, and not one many people would appreciate. Where did it come from? There’s some kind of conditional misophonia within me — I find singing distasteful, but only sometimes. Somewhere in my brain is the impulse to justify the inexplicable fire that fills my skull whenever someone sings along to show tunes or utters “Pentatonix.” I’ve retyped this paragraph more times than anything I’ve written in the blog so far, defending my subconscious and restarting because I know it’s incoherent. Know this: I like to hear singing in specific contexts, and find it annoying elsewhere.
Is that frustrating? I think it is, because I love to sing. Anyone that knows me well is probably aware that I spent several years as vocalist for The Empty Sets. The bathrooms and cars and offices of my life have heard countless hours of earnest belting. But, most people haven’t heard me sing because I apply to it the filter I would to everyone else: I need some sort of license, the guise of performance or rehearsal, or else an extreme comfort, to sing. If you walk in on me while I am singing alone, I will stop, and feel similarly to how I’d feel if you walked in on me eating your stolen sandwich.
So, you know that I find your singing irritating most of the time. Don’t stop on my account; I’m just throwing this out there because I know it doesn’t make sense, and you’ve already done me a favor by reading it. Please invite me to your bands’ performances and your choir concerts, though. I do enjoy them.
Now, in a move of impossibly vain self-reflection, I will tell you about a time when I was singing. Last summer, I was off the coast of New England, aboard the SSV Corwith Cramer. I had two working shifts every day: once from noon to four in the afternoon, and again from midnight to four in the morning. The fog was heavy the first time I was on lookout at midnight. I stood harnessed to the rigging near the bow, and there was nothing to see but the ship’s lights diffusing through the fog. I was nervous about the hazards I couldn’t see, yet somehow bored out of my mind. So, I sang to myself:
No god could teach me
what my father did.
No promise of Heaven
kept me warm when my
mother tucked me in.
No hope for salvation
kept me from sin;
just a small intuition
not to do what
all the bad ones did.
These lyrics were unrelated to my bleary gazing into the night. They were just the first things to come to mind. When I sang out over the ocean, this dice-roll of a song selection came back with the sort of force that made my brain feel like it had been knocked out into the water. Those words echoed back to all the years I spent in all locations singing, remembering, or listening to them, and now I was further from them than ever — further from coddled development, from a divergent coming-of-age and bets on salvation. Now, they formed part of an undeniable musical history, part of a tapestry of my life formed with references to the art of others. “No God” still rang the same, even out in the muffled vastness of the oceanic night.
If anyone on that boat heard my belting, though, I do apologize.
The Color Spectrum is a collection of nine EPs by The Dear Hunter. Each EP represents a different feel, corresponding to a color: White, Black, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. They are collectively one of my favorite projects from any musical artist, but Casey Crescenzo and company are well-known for their ambitious concepts. The center of The Dear Hunter’s other material is a collection of five albums, the Acts, which tell a single story and, while uniformly well-done, haven’t been shy about developing new musical branches as time passes.
I was in high school when I first encountered The Dear Hunter. This is a case where the exact moment is lost to me now. I don’t remember any moment of blessed discovery, and something about that makes The Color Spectrum feel unique. I can’t tell you when I began listening to it — it’s just been a part of my life for a long time, like a family dog that your parents brought home while you were gone. The many moods encompassed by the album made it a versatile favorite, and so in nearly every environment it has come back to me.
In the summer of 2012, I was on a bus. I’d been fired from summer camp staff at Camp Wilderness, and my former boss was on the same bus. We were both on our way to the National Scout Jamboree in West Virginia. That trip exists in the twilight of memories that seem unbelievable, but not because they make for a riveting tale of adventure. The Jamboree was a soupy, hormonal set of disjointed experiences that, aside from my friend Gabe, seem very lonely in my mind.
I had primed myself by listening to The Color Spectrum on perpetual loop. The orchestral strains of the “Violet” section were my respite aboard that bus filled with sloppily uniformed, stir-crazy, foul-smelling adolescents. Music did little to mask the scent, but it did provide some sense of beauty which was appropriately ephemeral. Soon, we all faced the electronic purgatory that was the Summit Bechdel Scout Reserve.
Of course, to listen to my favorite music in its full glory, I needed my iPod. Tech like that was always heavily stigmatized, even disallowed on Scout trips then. Given the context, I still vouch that this is an appropriate measure. On camping trips now, I might take pictures, but usually trying to hang on to digital connection means the reception falters and the battery drains before my eyes. As my phone becomes a half-cocked facsimile of the device it is when I’m in the city, ferreting away screen time seems provincial and counterproductive, more like scratching an itch than doing anything meaningful. The mosquitoes give me enough to scratch.
Everyone scratched at the Jamboree: AT&T hauled in charging stations and gargantuan Wi-Fi towers. By the end of our stay, these were ripe for literary speculation. They were altars, bars, public forums, monuments, etc. We all hovered around the structures, sweating, conversing, waiting to swoop in and grab the first available cable that wasn’t busted. The heat and overloaded internet service meant that even those who weren’t hooked up to the slow drip of electricity were often tethered to the charging stations as their batteries burned up.
Individual activities did take much of the time, but the other more constant thing I remember is the rain. Somehow it was constantly raining, yet incredibly hot. Thousands of people trod on the sodden ground, turning it into gravelly mush, which exacerbated the effect of the towering Wi-Fi monoliths: the place lost much of the illusion of even being a camping trip at all, save the tents. Surrendering this illusion, the brief moments I could find to listen to music seemed justified. My emotions at the time were charged by colors: deep violet, filled with gritty saxophones under strings; red, running feverishly through a slow throng fleeing the weather; orange, for being sunny when faced with the cynicism of teenagers fighting for position in any kind of line. The list goes on, but unlike other times in my life I seemed to have a single album that could accent any feeling rather than simply tinting it with the intrinsic enjoyability of music itself.
There’s more to be said about that hazy week in West Virginia, but it seems prudent to stop that part of the story here. I could retroactively attach musical significance to more of the events there; however, I struggle with what this writing truly is sometimes. Is it a story about me, or the music? It’s supposed to be both, but excluding the purer parts of the Venn diagram of “Experience” and “Musical Opinion” doesn’t make for fantastic writing. The truth is that when I was failing to mountain-board or eating a frozen sandwich or taking a heat-exhausted friend to the medic tent, I don’t remember what was playing in my head.
During my tenure playing vocalist in The Empty Sets, I wanted to cover one of the “orange” tracks. I began to wonder: what is it about this music that summons reverence in some and ambivalence in others? I got our rhythm guitarist, Brad, to really enjoy parts of The Color Spectrum, which seemed reasonable. Nobody else in The Empty Sets took to The Dear Hunter, nor has almost anyone I’ve introduced. I was confused. Here is music blending multitudes of elements and instruments: orchestral, swing, electronica, and anything along the folk-rock-metal spectrum within reason. And in The Color Spectrum, each is isolated and displayed. The album has something for everyone; conversely, everyone will ignore parts of it.
Elsie, a friend and former significant other, was an exception to the ambivalence, but we still share a lot of similar tastes. We saw The Dear Hunter in concert and, to our surprise, there was a considerable wait to get into the Triple Rock that night. Despite the large catalog of music and the relatively low popularity, we found ourselves in an ecstatic sea of human beings singing along to every song. These people were probably like me, finding parts of this versatile catalog to love, but when I say something like The Color Spectrum has “something for everyone,” I guess I can only mean everyone in a specific group.
I was wrong to think my personal soundtrack, broad as it was, could be loved by everyone. Its versatility was meaningful for me, but now helps me realize how much there is to listen to in the world. One finite set of songs will never be meaningful to everyone. Still, seven years after I discovered The Color Spectrum, it’s still a damn-good album.
