In the five years since Tyler Hache’s 2015 debut album, Silence, for which he received Music/Musique NB’s award for Solo Recording of the Year, he was also named CBC Searchlight Regional Champion, had his music featured in the film Love Alaska (2019), and four more of his songs were featured in the television drama The Wedding Planners (2020). So, he’s been busy, and all the more busy completing an MA in English in the Field of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto – a fact that becomes all the more apparent when you realize his new single, “Let the Colours Run”, is really a deep dive in historical fiction.
Co-written and recorded in Nashville with Concord producer Andrew Petroff, “Let the Colours Run” was inspired by George Saunders’ novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, and curiously reminiscent of The Chemical Brothers’ “My Elastic Eye” – complete with kinderklavier. The juxtaposition between the songs playful and dramatic elements seems suitable, given that Hache describes the song as a means of “finding empathy amidst the modern entanglements of our world.”
“The inspiration for the song came from George Saunders’s novel Lincoln in the Bardo. I had just finished reading the book when Andrew Petroff and I got together to write this one; I was extremely moved by the novel, and I brought my copy of the book with me to the studio that day in Nashville,” explains Hache, as he prepares a strong creative fiction flex.
“Saunders’s novel centers on the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son, Willie, in 1862, toward the beginning of the American Civil War. It’s an experimental novel—comprising of something like 166 narrators—that blends historical details and fiction, blurring the line between the two. On certain nights, following his son’s death, Abraham Lincoln would supposedly go visit his body which was being temporarily held in a crypt at the Oak Hill Cemetery. This crypt represents a central idea in the novel, the Tibetan Buddhist idea of the ‘Bardo,’ which means ‘in-between’ and is often used to describe the state between death and rebirth.
“Because of their unwillingness to accept the fact of death, the father and son are together trapped in this intermediary place, a kind of purgatory or limbo, in the cemetery, that is populated by other spirits who, for various reasons, are unwilling to let go of the world of the living. The novel proceeds through the efforts of these other spirits to try to get Willie, and Abraham Lincoln, to let go, to grow into what’s inevitably to come.”
Similarly, in a way that sounds painfully apt given these uncertain times, Hache says that “Let the Colours Run” is about “the paradoxical need to let go of life in order for life to continue.”
“It’s about loosening my grasp on the world,” says Hache. “It’s also about writing itself: letting go of language, of meaning, and of linearity, in order to discover deeper meaning. I associate this style of writing with the image of paint being thrown onto a canvas and making a picture out of what begins to appear naturally once the colours begin to bleed together. I didn’t walk into the writing session planning to write about all of these things in a song. None of this was really planned. And that’s kind of the point.
“My favourite songwriter, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco—who is a friend of Saunders, actually—talks about his approach to songwriting in this way, as a kind of unconscious process of discovery. He insists that as a writer, it’s often best to just try and get out of the way. I like this approach. I think that when you are moved by something—a novel, a poem, a film, etc.—it will naturally make its way into your song if you let it. A lot of the images in ‘Let the Colours Run’ are closely tied to the imagery in the book: ‘she’s in the Bardo she’s still tapping on the gate” arises from the blend of Tibetan Buddhist and Christian imagery in Lincoln in the Bardo, for example. But there’s also a broader connection between what this song means to me and how it relates to George Saunders’s writing more generally.”
“Ultimately, ‘Let the Colours Run’ is, for me, about finding empathy amidst the modern entanglements of our world. I think I borrowed this idea from some of Saunders’s other writing (his short story collection, The Tenth of December, in particular). One thing that seems to distinguish George Saunders from a lot of the postmodern writers that came before him is the way in which he acknowledges certain perceived ‘truths’ as socially constructed, as lacking inherent meaning—this idea is nothing new and can easily lead to an unproductively cynical view of the world. But Saunders’s writing acknowledges this, validates it, and then insists on kindness. He has this way of packaging kindness in a pretty badass way. I recommend his writing to everyone. Although it was published in 2017, I think Lincoln in the Bardo is particularly relevant right now: among many other things, this pandemic is, after all, a kind of Bardo, an ‘in-between.’’
Which, even if nothing else, benefits from being the most thoroughly thought out piece of music we’ve ever heard wound around an apropos bit of historical fiction. Hache gets full marks for knowing what he’s about well before the first beat ever drops.