A late Secret Santa gift: How Color for Colors made album "Heartache" through grief
Heartache doesn’t make for the kind of road that’s easy to prepare for; and when the proverbial road we’re all on includes people telling you to keep looking ahead, the already difficult task of processing heartache can be even more so.
For Ollie Hobson, better known musically as Color for Colors, heartache over the loss of his younger sister, Sophie, led to an album named “Heartache.” Released two years ago, songs like the title track, “Courtyard,” and “Rings of a Tree” are some of the most poignant ruminations of life and loss that come to mind for me contemporarily, with the album as a whole being a smooth blend of folk, rock and pop.
“And how could someone live so easy, when the world gets so hard? ‘Cause even the luckiest people, if they survive, they eulogize someday,” Hobson sings on “Rings of a Tree.”
For the native of Urbana-Champaign, Ill. and now Chicago-resident, the directness of his album’s subject matter belied the way he might have looked on the outside like he was, or wasn’t, dealing with grief.
“My way of dealing with personal emotional things has always been to create and not always directly,” Hobson, also a painter, said. “I think that’s actually been rarer. It's just sort of a therapeutic way that I naturally fall into.
“I had been making music in 2006. I started writing songs with a buddy of mine and I had taken it pretty seriously for a handful of years.”
That led to an EP release in 2008.
“And you know as most things do when you self-release … your friends hear it and that's about it,” Hobson said. “It was sort of … I didn’t experience the fruits of my labor, so to speak, so I felt a little exhausted from creating music for many years – or at least from finishing songs. I’ve written a lot of half-songs.”
It was almost a decade later, when tragedy struck, that Hobson’s semi-estranged relationship to music would change.
“I'm one of seven kids and one of my younger sisters, Sophie, who's the sixth –
she's five years younger than me,” Hobson said. “She passed away in 2016.”
Hobson still doesn’t know all the details, but he believes she was likely a casualty of an addiction that developed while she was on prescribed pain medication – with her overdosing from either obtaining a version with fentanyl or possibly a combination of similar drugs for pain relief.
“She passed away in December of 2016, and that was sort of the first real, certainly familial loss other than a grandparent which I'd experienced,” Hobson said. “Over the next year or so that caused me to start writing songs again, and I was working on one track which ends up being the first track on the album, ‘Courtyard.’”
Even for a song that acts as the cornerstone of an album, “Courtyard” has a particularly deep history.
“In my family, we used to give each other Secret Santa gifts,” Hobson said. “Having so many kids, it was just an easier way to … you know, you only have to buy a present for one child each year. So I had Sophie a couple years prior to her passing. And I said, as an impetus to make me write music, ‘Well, I'll write you a song for your gift.’ And that, I discovered, was a very difficult thing to do.
“I never quite finished it and I said, ‘Give me a little more time. I won't have it by Christmas, but I'll keep working on it.’ And I sort of kept pushing it off, pushing it off and eventually, she passed away before I ever made the song. So while I was working on this song after her death, I started to think about that. And you know, there was a little bit of guilt in that.”
Whether it would be released on a large platform or not, Hobson decided he was going to try finish that one song sort of about Sophie for her, he said.
“That’s the impetus for the album,” said Hobson. “And then it grew, and I created another song that was sort of about that.”
Creating an additional song got Hobson thinking about an EP. In 2019, he created a Kickstarter to raise funds for it.
“Then it got funded and I was going to make it five songs, and then the pandemic happened,” Hobson said. “I had all this time, and I couldn't go into the studio when I was supposed to. I just kept trying to write the fourth and fifth songs that I hadn't created, and originally it was going to be five songs for the five stages of grief, which I sort of came to after writing the first few, and I finished the fifth somewhere in the pandemic and then I put them all together and it felt too short … from going from ‘Courtyard’ to the final track, ‘Missed Calls,’ for a call back to that. It felt sort of incomplete, so I started throwing in all these half-songs I had written it over the pandemic and decided to flush them out and make it into a full album.”
In addition to the feedback of who he considers the album’s coproducer, Matt Milkowski, Hobson benefited from being in Chicago by being part of an improv community whose help he was able to utilize on the album, he said.
That dynamic took on another level with a project which saw different Chicago-based directors create music videos for the song’s eleven tracks, creating what Hobson called a visual album. Those eleven music videos are all up on YouTube and can be viewed as as one full, roughly 35-minute visual album at the link below:
Two years later, Hobson can look back and see more catharsis in the process of making the album than its release.
“Especially with that first song … ‘Courtyard,’” he said. “I worked so many hours just trying to write those lyrics and find those lyrics in sort of a painstaking way. I think that forced me to really think about Sophie and my relationship with her and our history and my memories of her.
“For whatever reason, I don't think I have great recall of the specificities of my childhood,” Hobson continued. “There was a stretch where I thought about this a lot while I was writing the album … I couldn't recall what my house growing up in which I lived until I was 16 looked like. But then I would have a lot of dreams that would always take place in this house. And then when I would be in the dream, I could see my room perfectly. All of that is to say it was just hard to pull memories, and it was sort of a difficult process to recall Sophie and figure out how I wanted to write about her and about what I was going through.”
But two or three years removed from the first song starting to be written, Hobson wasn’t “tender to the thoughts,” he said.
“I sort of mentioned this in the last song (‘Missed Calls’) a little bit, but like when I thought about her, it didn't bring up as much sadness. It was more like I felt like I had got into another level of where my grief was … where I could sort of think about her and be grateful but not like overwhelmingly sad about it. I feel like I'm still in that state post-release. Will I ever get back to the tender part of it? It's certainly possible.”
There was some catharsis, as well, in the album’s release. “Just sort of the relief of being finished and have it being out there and people hear it,” Hobson said.
But the other side of the grief and vulnerability at that point was wanting to hear people to evaluate “Heartache” just for its songs – an artist’s natural inclination, Hobson said, but it made for a weird mix.
The weirdness seems to disappear, however, when Hobson hears his music brought someone else a brief moment of comfort, whether it be through the subject matter or perhaps because “Heartache” (the specific track on the album) is danceable.
And as Thom Yorke said in an interview, "My cliche thing I always says is, like, ‘You know you’re in trouble when people stop listening to sad music, because the moment people stop listening to sad music, they don't want to know anymore.’”
Find “Heartache” on all major music streaming platforms, like Bandcamp, and learn more about Hobson at www.colorforcolors.com.
