Erik Dylan’s recent release “Color Blind” has been making waves digitally and at radio this week, with a message that feels both incredibly pertinent to current events but simultaneously timeless. “Color Blind” is an ode to an awareness of difference; Dylan describes a world with “no green lights, neon nights, blue eyes crying in the rain / no pink painted skies, no fields of golden grain / but if I can’t help but wonder if the world were only shades of gray / no red and yellow, brown and black and white / would the hurting stop? would we be better off colorblind?”
Dylan says the song was inspired by the recent events in Ferguson.
“The verdict and the riots happened back in November and Townes, my son, was sitting next to me on the couch,” Dylan told a Connecticut radio station. “He was about a year old, and I think it’s the first time I ever felt guilt as a parent about what I was leaving for him in this world. It just made me feel bad that we haven’t gotten better at this and that color does still matter in our society.”
“I’m gonna try and do everything I can to make sure that his life isn’t that way when he’s my age. It’s a tough song to sing about and it’s a tough song to pitch – we’ve pitched it to a tons of different artists, and everybody liked it, but nobody wanted to say it because they were scared of what people would think when they heard it. So I just decided to do it myself.”
With a soaring chorus and humbled verses, Dylan delivers a dynamic depiction of what could be. Check out “Color Blind” below and on iTunes.