Yahoo News On 'Cyan Blue,' Charlotte Day Wilson’s Inner Child Takes Center Stage
What is it about the color blue? For years, many artists have clung to the cool tint to signify a variety of things—melancholy and grief; serenity and spirituality. For Charlotte Day Wilson, whose sophomore album is titled Cyan Blue, it’s an amalgamation of all that and more.
“I was experiencing some sort of synesthesia with a color between green and blue,” the Canadian singer-songwriter and producer explains. She’s joined our mid-afternoon Zoom from her living room couch in her open and sunny Toronto home, dressed down in an oversized gray hoodie. “That’s why the title is Cyan Blue. I had a lens through which I was being guided creatively and it was a really cool experience for that guiding force to be a color spectrum.”
Since releasing two EPs (2016’s CDW and 2018’s Stone Woman) and her debut album ALPHA in 2021, “I always thought that my music was an ombre orange, yellow, red thing,” she says. “I just assumed that that was my go-to world. So since this was such an opposite color spectrum for me to work with, I kind of leaned into it. And once I picked it, I started seeing it everywhere. It’s like when you buy a car and then you see it on the road all the time.” She notes that she found the color in places like the horizon line between the California sea and sky and in the innocent eyes of her young nephew.
Cyan Blue, out today, captures the various shades that have made up Wilson’s inner life. In the title track, she addresses her inner child (a theme that she comes back to often): “I wish I could see through your eyes / One more time.” On “New Day,” she speaks about her complicated desire to be a mother: “When everything’s / Stacked against us / Give her my name.” Cushioning these lyrics are Wilson’s usual piano instrumentation, atmospheric melodies, and R&B sonics. Her distinctly confessional and soothing sound has even caught the eye of fellow Canadian crooner Drake (more on him later).
Here, Wilson talks to ELLE.com about making her sophomore album, connecting with her inner child, and finding unlikely inspiration in The Wizard of Oz.
Since your debut album ALPHA came out in 2021, what’s changed?
A big thing that’s changed is that things aren’t shut down anymore. My last album came out during the pandemic and I was working on it for the majority of the pandemic. It was a pretty isolating experience. It was hard to feel connected to everyone around when we were all so alone. My process with that album creatively was very insular and very isolating. I was just by myself playing everything and writing everything. Now, I’m coming out of that.
How do you feel about that album now that you’re a few years removed from it?
I love it more than I did when it came out. At the time, I still felt those perfectionist things like wanting to keep tinkering with it and not feeling sure if things were done. Now that time has passed, I think it’s aged well, for me at least.
What were you interested in exploring with Cyan Blue?
Connection. I think it’s one of the most human pursuits that we have as people. We want to connect with other folks, whether it’s people in our community, our neighbors, our partners, our friends, our parents. We want to find those moments.
Did the album title come before the songs?
No, it was a bit about halfway through that I started to think that maybe that could be the title. The other thing with the title is that my eyes are green and blue. On the title track “Cyan Blue,” I talk about how I wish I could see through my younger eyes. That’s a theme that I tend to lean towards a lot, talking to my younger self or different versions of myself. Whether it’s past, present, or future, it’s something that I find really interesting in music. So I follow those leads. Music is a vessel for me to talk to my younger self. It’s healing.
What were you like as a child?
You know, I ask my parents this all the time. I think I was a pretty happy kid. But, obviously, as the teenage years came along, that’s when it started to get real dark. So these songs are kind of like me wanting to connect with the version of myself that was pure, before things like being a closeted teen were affecting me.
The ninth track on the album is a cover of “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz. Was that another way you were calling back to your childhood?
[Laughs] I was lying in bed one night and I started singing “Over the Rainbow” to myself while I was in that weird liminal space between being asleep and being awake. And I was just laughing because I was changing the lyrics and turning it into a song about when a girl is over her gay phase. It was like, “Oh, she’s over the rainbow now.” So then I rewrote a bunch of lyrics to it and I recorded it like that, but we couldn’t get that cleared. So then I had to do a straight cover. In the end, I did find a lot of amazing metaphors that tied in with the rest of the album and it’s just such a beautiful song and I love the arrangement that my friend Jack [Rochon, her co-producer] and I did for it.
I wish they had cleared your original idea.
I think I’ll perform it on stage and people can hear the harshness of what the lyrics were. I think in the end it was a blessing in disguise that I wasn’t allowed to say what I was saying.
That’s a good incentive to catch you on tour.
[Laughs] Yeah.
I also really like the song “New Day” where you sing about motherhood. What’s the story behind that one?
That’s definitely the most deeply personal song on the record. It’s about something that myself and my community and my partner talk about, but I don’t think I’ve heard people write about it before. The song is about the grief and pain that you go through as a queer person in a queer relationship when you’re thinking about having children and how only one parent can be genetically tied to that child. So I’ve always thought about how that would feel. It’s a song about how I want the child and even if she doesn’t have my face, she’ll have my name. So that’s what it’s about. I just want a new day, a new Charlotte Day.
Do you ever feel nervous about being vulnerable in your music, especially in this internet era where things get misconstrued so easily?
I do, but that’s what art is. It’s pure expression. And I know that if it’s something that’s really vulnerable, then other people have felt it too and they probably have been scared to say it or haven’t had an arena to commiserate with other people about it. The thing that I get more scared about is putting out songs that I’m not 100 percent sure are completely true to me.
Did you listen to any music while making the album?
No, I tend to not listen to music when I’m working on my projects because I feel like I absorb too much and I don’t ever want to be too heavily influenced by something. Even if I listen to a song on the way to the studio when I’m in that creative state, there’s a chance that I might end up being like, “Oh, I wanna make something like this.”
I immediately thought of Joni Mitchell’s album Blue, since the title is similar.
That was an influence. I was staying in Laurel Canyon and I was in this blue phase and obviously that album is a hugely influential album for me. But, I don’t know if I would... it’s tough. I feel like some of my heroes have been disappointing me recently. I just found out that she’s done blackface and has an album [Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter] where she’s in blackface. It’s crazy that a lot of people don’t know about that. And she’s never said anything publicly about that or apologized. The same goes for Patti Smith who’s covered my song “Work.” I can’t rock with her anymore because she has a song [“Rock N Roll N*****”] that she [released in the seventies], but she’s continued to perform it up until 2019 and has never apologized for it. It’s tough when you have these people who are hugely influential to you, but can’t rock with anymore. I was so touched that she was covering my song, but disappointed to find those things out.
Wow, I didn’t know that.
It’s fucked up. Everyone should just learn how to take responsibility for their weird fucking actions that they took in the sixties and seventies and somehow didn’t understand that that was wrong. And if you don’t understand that it was wrong at this point, then something’s really wrong with you. And if you can’t say sorry and know that you should apologize, then you’re not cool in my books.
How would you describe yourself as an artist?
I’m a technical artist. I’m not just a singer, I’m a producer, multi-instrumentalist, and engineer. That’s something that not everyone knows. And as a woman, I do like to talk about that. It’s not always the most interesting thing, but that’s where my love for music lies. It’s in the studio and it’s in the process of recording.
Are you a self-taught producer?
Mostly. But I have had some really important sessions with people and some great mentors who have given me the time of day to let me ask questions about every little thing that they’re doing. But YouTube also taught me a lot.
With this new album, what did you want to achieve artistically?
What I set out to do with this body of work was to challenge my perfectionism and to just capture a moment in time and not obsess over any of the details of how this work was being put together. That was deeply in contrast to my process before. So I definitely achieved that with the help of my co-producer Jack. And I’m super proud of that. I feel like I’ve really grown because of this experience.
What did making this project teach you?
“Don’t edit the feeling.” You need to put yourself in the best possible scenario to have something flow through you, put it on paper, and leave it there.
I want to, naturally, pivot to Drake. He sampled your song “Mountains” on his Certified Lover Boy track “Fair Trade.” How’d that happen?
It was actually a complete surprise to me. It was a producer named OZ who sampled it and I guess played it for Drake and then he wrote something on top of it. And my cousin Oliver El-Khatib owns OVO and started it with Drake. So I thought that maybe there was some connection there as to how this came about, but there was zero connection. It was just that this producer flipped the sample, made a beat out of it, and Drake liked it. But yeah, when I heard it, I was so excited. I love how they did it. It’s awesome to be part of a record like that. Drake has been one of my favorite artists for a really long time, especially coming from Toronto. And plus, I watched him and my cousin build OVO from the ground up. Oliver is my cool older cousin, so it was amazing to finally be involved in something he was doing, too. It was really nice.
I never knew that was your cousin!
[Laughs] Yeah. The family genes are strong.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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