Spoken Word: Orange Coloured Daydreams

Blown: Orange Coloured Daydreams

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The past is an interesting place. While it’s undeniable that we are all the sum totals of our experiences, it’s sometimes hard to apprehend exactly how this can be so. Equally, we can’t escape nostalgia, especially when it comes to our childhoods. Even the worst of times can be tinted by a patina of magic, because looking back on innocence (for want of a less loaded word) with jaded adult eyes creates a sheen that is both inevitable and deeply desirable.

At the same time, the past can be almost impossible to understand. This song’s protagonist looks dreams of an idyllic childhood in pre-revolutionary Iran with the adult knowledge that there was far more going on than he could have realised and that ‘when you’re young you never know that good things come and good things go,’ but still retains the ability to return to a world that may never have existed simply by dreaming about it. The sun that lit his childhood is inside him – it may only ever have been – but at least that way the past need not remain out of reach.

An admission – this song represents my past. While my actual involvement in it was relatively small - a few lines added here, some structure imposed there - and the majority of the words are someone else’s, it featured on my band’s debut (and, as it turned out, only) album way back in 1994. All these years later, I realise that I feel the same way about that period of my life as Farhad (my bandmate, producer and friend to this day) felt when he sat down to write the poem that would become Orange Coloured Daydreams. For all the stress and heartache that I know intellectually was present back then, there is nonetheless something magical about that time that I like to revisit now and then. Even if those weren’t the best days of my life, it’s sometimes fun to imagine them that way.

Guest post by Houman