“In the early days, I wrote a lot about love and identity. Then songs about getting older and death started creeping in. Lately, I’ve written more about consciousness, for lack of a better word, and my experiences with meditation.”
Welcome to the immersive world of Color Theory, aka electronic musician Brian Hazard, the Los Angeles-based artist, who’s best known for his melancholic vocal synthwave music. Hazard has been releasing albums since 1994 and over the years his music has evolved with 12 full-length albums and 37 releases on Bandcamp.
In 2001 his track ‘Ponytail Girl’ was famously mistaken for a lost Depeche Mode B-side and was shared over countless fan sites and bootleg CDs. Since then, his music has generated more than 5 million plays across streaming platforms. Hazard’s last three albums, ‘Mages’ (2021), ‘Lucky Ago’ (2019), and ‘The Majesty of Our Broken Past’ (2018), encapsulate the mature and well-crafted songwriting talent that he is best known for.
So why did Hazard decide to embrace the Web3 ecosystem, and drop a debut Web3 audio track on Public Pressure’s music platform?
“The deciding factor for me is that Public Pressure doesn’t require my fans to invest in crypto,” Hazard said, “they can participate with good old reliable cash if they’re not ready to take the plunge”.
His debut Web3 track ‘The Same’ is a 200 BPM distinctive 80s-influenced synthpop song. As all of Hazard’s tracks do, ‘The Same’ started simply with the title. Then, while improvising vocal ideas over the chorus, he stumbled across the line “a rose by any other name smells the same.”
“I blame my high school English teacher for lingering on Romeo and Juliet for so long”, he goes on to say, “the song feels happy and carefree until you listen to the lyrics. At its core, the song is about fearing change. When the world around us is constantly changing, how can two people be sure they’ll feel the same way about each other in the future?”
He who wants a rose must respect the thorn.
