Studio Notes & Comments: An anthem for the severely colour blind (?!). This song catches the band in a distinctly "acoustic phase", being the follow-up song to "A Good Woman". The main part of the song is kept fairly simple, with just acoustic guitar an bass providing the music. The guitar plays a laid-back theme, which is none-the-less given a feeling of tonal complexity by the use of augmented chords and alternating between strumming and arpeggio approaches to the chord patterns. The 6-string bass is also given a prominant role here, providing a strong melodic lead to some of the chordal sections. The lyrics constantly return to the theme of "blue is gold", in which the narrator is strolling along a sun-drenched beach and enjoying the blue sea and sky, while thinking of the blue eyes of the woman in his life. [The lyrics also have a parallel meaning which we won't go into at this stage!].
The song then goes into a very long outro section, which consists of a repeteated 5 chord sequence, which builds up gradually. It begins with a simple fingerstyle acoustic guitar and is gradually joined by bass, clean and distorted electric guitar and some wild lead guitar at the end. During this section, Jimmy performs his first multi-lingual vocals and informs us that "blue is gold" in English, Swedish, German & French! We were very satisfied with the sound we acheived on this song. The acoustic guitar was mic'd using the Audio-Technica MB400C condenser and sounds clean and crisp. The vocal sound is also exceptionally clear and natural.....the result of our new Rœdde NT-1 condenser mic and DBX studio quality mic preamp/processer. The "de-esser" on the DBX is a particularly useful device, taking away all those sibliant "ssssssss" sounds from the vocals (by making a selective hig-frequency EQ cut).
