Cool Blue

Album: Aquatic Flowers (2021)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Sometimes you fall in love with what you wish you were." That's what was on Tristen's mind when the Nashville singer-songwriter wrote this tune about a wildly emotive woman who falls in love with a statue.

    "I was very into the idea that we sometimes fall in love with an ideal person who's not who we are," she told the Songfacts Podcast in 2022, "and I definitely picked somebody that was way more stable than I was because I felt it was more attractive than the self-loathing that comes out when you pick your partner. It's also wondering where those emotions go because some people are more emotional than others. Do they just get stuffed inside and then they come out in other ways?"
  • Tristen said she relates to the woman in the song because she's also a passionate person who needs to express her feelings as they arise. "That song is definitely autobiographical," she admitted, "and also about the challenge of being a really emotional, passionate person, and trying to explain that to somebody who's very stoic and hardened and stiff-upper-lipped. You feel like you're this crazy person, but then you get around someone who's as emotional and wild as you, or wilder, and you're like, 'Oh, I've got it together.'"
  • She was inspired by "Ozymandias," an 1818 sonnet by English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley about the shattered tomb of an Ancient Egyptian king. "It reminded me of Donald Trump, too - this strong statue, but it's been disintegrated over time and the wind's blowing on it and it's like this desolate figure," she told Songfacts.
  • This is a track from Tristen's fourth studio album, Aquatic Flowers, which arrived a decade after her debut release, Charlatans At The Garden Gate.
  • Tristen and her husband/collaborator, Buddy Hughen, made the album in their home studio in Madison, a suburb of Nashville. They played many of the instruments themselves, but invited a handful of friends to round out the rhythm section, including drummers Andy Spore of How I Became The Bomb, Ryan Brewer of Robyn Hitchcock's touring band, bassist Linwood Regensburg of Those Darlins, and veteran upright-bass player James Haggerty.

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