O, how is it that I hate country music claim it's physically painful to me but am once again going to see Della Mae (a bluegrass band) again? Well. I get it's confusing, how many bluegrass artists are among my favorite artists definitely seems on the surface inconsistent with my claim that country radio and country style vocalists cause me physical nerve pain. The short version of it is that the ladies of Della Mae are wonderful humans and activists and most of their songs are beautiful with brilliant instrumentation, I don't love all their songs because sometimes their vocals/harmonies twang enough to be physically painful for me but not most of the time. It's about 30% of the time that their vocals are off enough due to country twang to be painful, but not as bad as most country singers and the other 70% makes up for it. There ARE country vocalists  like (though no bro country artists and no country radio cma artists, not even Taylor Swift.) Most of the country artists I like come from bluegrass or older classic country music. 

The more complete version is that the physical pain from MOST twanging vocals is a byproduct of my color-timbre synesthesia and thus to understand it you need to understand the synesthesia itself..... So, I can't TELL you exactly how/why a grad piano is the silky deep indigo-blue-blacks through silvery-steel of waves on open water under a full moon or a fiddle flickers the crimson-tawny-golds of firelight but in the jewel tone clarity of precious gems or a cello is a deep-crimson purply wine colored jewel tone or an acoustic guitar with typical metal strings is the jewel like green of sunlit birch/beech/aspen Sprig/Summer leaves but a classical guitar (or any guitar strung with nylon strings) is the beautiful golds of sun through birch/aspen Autumn leaves or why an electric guitar (without any pedals or anything that causes distortion wobbles on the timbres) is a metallic cherry fire truck red or why woodwinds are the clear blues/turquoises/greens of Caribbean ocean waters or why harp (and harpsichord) are the golden hour colors like when the air is saturated with sunlight or why all brass instruments are different types of brilliantly metallic greens in different hues depeding on what type of brass instrument..... MOST standard drums are just sort of a sudden brown or copper toned with the cymbals a shimmery like crackly swirly fireworks but then a kettle drum or even a timpani has a shimmery rainbow irridescent blue tone to it depending on where you hit and how long the sound resonates to amplify.... I don't know exactly WHY I experience musical tone timbres as the colors/textures/energies I perceive them, but there IS a tonal relation between instruments in the same families or constructed similarly. Pretty much anything that is a string resonating over wood has the deepest jewel tones and clarity like light behind a stained glass window whereas the more metal is the more it has that shiny polished reflective metallic aspect. And there is definitely a correlation between higher notes being lighter/brighter hues in the color family and deeper/lower notes being the darker hues within the color family...So allt he isntruments in the strings family from fiddle/violin to viola to cello to upright bass is all the same color family that goes from fiery-tawny-white gold to rubies/garnets to deep chianti into pnot noir wines and then purply-iolite into sapphire royal blues. The higher notes on a piano are the moonlight colored crests of the waves while the lowest notes are the deeper almost black indigos of the wave and the rest of the notes are all the shades along the curve of the wave. Capo on the guitar to shorten the string tension make the notes higher/brighter makes them more chartreuse and not the deeper emeralds of a typical acoustic guitar. The colors, of all instruments, are brightest and clearest and richest when I hear the acoustic instrument with my own ear, no mics or speakers or digital editing or distortion. Compression of the sound waves or digital manipulation to smooth out or move notes also compresses out the timbre signatures so it desaturates colors -- the more digital and the less mechanical resonance, the more desaturated the colors. To the extent that say a keyboard or digital piano is like a black and white photo/video of moonlight dancing on ocean waves. Everything digitally created or synth is all black and white to me, none of it is colored. 

So that's instruments. Vocals can be a wide range of colors and textures, many people have two different colors/textures in their chest voice versus head voice or where they have natural breaks in their range. People who have one color/texture gradient across their entire vocal range are exceedingly rare. (Also blood relative vocals TEND to have similar color families, like a strings arrangement, which is why blood harmonies tend not to clash as badly as some other voice harmonies do. Mot voices that don't blend, if you asked me with my synesthesia why it doesn't work I would tell you that it's because the colors of their timbres clash even though they sound good apart.)  

The other thing to know is that movement off a true note is like layering a filter across the colors of the instruments true note and the further you move off the note the more intense it gets until the point that is the halfway to the flat/sharp true notes and that mix of grey-purple and orange-brown makes like an opaque pint water from rinsing contrasting colors too much version of the true note. A note that is sharp off true goes brown-orange-safety cone blaze orange while a note falling into sharp moves grayish into pigeon into blue-periwinkle layers. So a guitar out of tune, unless you've adjusted your fingering for the not quite in tune string, becomes a brown/range filter layer over the green or a grey/purple filter over the green -- play around with the hues/basic color overlays filters of any basic photo editing filter and you'll understand why some instruments out of tune are more painful than others and why the further they get out of tune and why having one string slightly flat and the next slightly sharp makes things muddy and discordant....

Right. So. Now you get the basics of the way moving off the true note creates intense sometimes conflicting color filters over the true note color. Now Think about the way that a country twang slides and moves from the true note to the next true note, think of the way it goes suddenly sharp or bit flat then sharp then back to a true note. Now imagine you experience all of that slide as a psychedelic change of color along your optic nerve EVEN IF YOU CLOSE YOUR EYES. And now imagine that you're starting with a voice that's naturally a green into chartreuse or turquoise in the lower and hot pink the falsetto and you're now putting the brown-orange sliding filter over those colors or you go grey-purple filter to sudden orange filter back to the true color again in these ever shifting acid trip color combinations. THAT is how I experience the sliding from one true note to the next with a country twang between the notes....

So the ONLY voices I can handle twang on are ones where an orange filter looks good on the normal base color, like when you have fiddle like red vocals or gold colored vocals.  And if your voice is blue or silvery, going slightly grey on your notes isn't actually painful on your voice the way it would be on someone with a fuchsia voice hitting their note flat....This is why it's FAR easier to tell people that country vocals are physically painful for me than to explain why 95% of them are physically painful but select artists putting a country twang n their vocals never bother me.  Exceptions include Alison Krauss, Bonnie Raitt, Rhiannon Giddens, some Patsy Cline, some Johnny Cash, Eagles songs that other people find too country, all three singers in Nickel Creek...It's all because the true colors of their voiced singing timbres create complimentary colors under the filter of a twang on them.

Now, Celia (the main singer of Della Mae, who started in 2009 and got their name from the lyrics of the classic bluegrass song Big Spike Hammer) has voice that in the lower alto part of her range is very closely akin to the fiery tawny fiddle colors of Alison Krauss' voice -- so twangs on their vocals aren't painful. It's just an orangier version of rad-gold tawny. BUT Celia's head voice as she gets closer into her contralto range gets a very magenta color as she get higher then into a bubblegum hot pink -- so the intermittent brown orange overlay of a twang on her higher range IS painful to me. Most of the time she sings in her alto range and it's beautiful, but not always for me when she twangs on notes she takes into the pinker portion of her range. When the other members sing lead, it varies as to whether I like the color experience of the song or actively dislike it, but none of their voices or harmonies are physical flinching from the nerve pain of the color contrasts the twanging produces like with most country radio artists.... And it is a physical flinching nerve pain if you ask me to listen to most country radio artists. Like smacking me with a live electric cable. It's worse when you have a country singer open for you though than when you have pre recorded country music playing, but both are bad.....

Also, Della Mae are just genuinely GOOD women fighting all the good fights and encouraging women musicians and using their career as a platform to stand up speak out on social justice issues. And they write songs that are musically gorgeous but talk about what's going on right now like The Way It Was Before (which is on their 2021 self released newest album, Family Reunion) and which they introduced tonight as being a song about how we all need to have more compassion for the suffering of others, that regardless of our religious or political affiliations, the lack of compassion is what allows the suffering to continue. This song is so powerful and beautiful and I love it but it always makes me tear up and feel so much sorrow and anger over all the man-made ego/selfishness driven suffering in our modern world.  Tonight was no exception -- those verses kicking you in the fucking gut but in the best possible speaking the uncomfortable truths out loud way. While the chorus is the reminder call to arms that nothing changes unless we all band together to change it. And that's important, to keep speaking the uncomfortable truths out loud no matter who wants to shut you up or bury the truth because they don't like the light their actions cast them in how calling it out makes them look if everyone knew.  And to remind you that everything broken can be fixed by intention if you decide to break the cycles and no longer repeat the way that things have been done before.

Anyway, I adore the ladies of Della Mae, and I have since discovering them in 2012. As musicians and as humans and as songwriters using their music as a platform to speak the hard truths ask people to face them. 

And yeah, I actually went to the effort of putting on eye shadow and eye liner and mascara for them. (The only makeup I own right now are my eye pigments and nail polishes. I really don't wear much makeup ever this life because this life is about bare faced honesty and being loved for me qua me this life after spending my last life with so many in love with their idea of me but nobody ever really seeing ME.... But I do sometimes enjoy painting colors on my eyelids and fun colorful eye liners and occasionally giving my emo love of black cat eyes a chance to come out an play.  Mostly the eye colors help to cover the fact my skin is so transparent and you can see the veins in my eyelids without it. Mostly what I own are metallic neutrals and then colored eyeliners that pop the green or aquamarine colors in my eyes make the color of them extra brilliant.)

See? I was cute tonight. A bit fée elfin as full of smirks as smiles, but cute. Even after taking my contacts out to give my eyes a break and putting my glasses on, your girl still cute. Terribly myopic since I was 9 years old (both my parents wear glasses) and without glasses/contacts I can't see much clearly unless it's right in front of my face, but wide eyed and cute. Tired and bespectacled, but still cute.

 

 

But now the rain is passed through and the chamomile is kicking in and the dogs are putting out sleepy vibes.... So I'm going to listen to my body and cute or not curl up here on the couch listening to the Nat Geo marathon of Vikings: the Rise and Fall documentaries I've had on since I got home. Until the TV turns itself off from me not doing anything or the switch to paid programming at 5am around when the pre-dawn and the birds wake me up for the sunrise anyway. Because obviously the bloody history of the Vikings raids on Europe is the sort of things everyone falls asleep to.  *yawns* I'mma try to get some sleep in before sunrise and then some more after sunrise is past. 

Bonne nuit.