I was at a bit of a loose end tonight, stuck between the glut of Valentine’s Day songs we just featured and preparing for an outright barrage of releases that will arrive this coming Friday, which will keep that midnight oil burning, and then I chanced upon this little gem which I’d somehow managed to overlook.
Zoé-Loes Barree is Dutch/German, based in Norway, which is ok where NMC is concerned. You only require a residence permit to get in here if your song is good enough and this one is!
She seems to have two Facebook pages unless I’ve got confused and if I’m right (there can’t be two people with that same name surely?) Zoé-Loes was once a contestant on ‘The Voice of Germany’, refers to herself as ‘Zolo’ (nice one) andis a student in the Lillehammer kreative videregående skole. I’ve never been to Lillehammer. I thought I was there once but it was only Lillestrøm, which is just outside Oslo. I wondered why I couldn’t see any ski slopes.
Apart from the piste, Lillehammer is also famous for its Peer Gynt festival and is also the home town of a regular in these pages, Øystein Skar, now going solo and once of Highasakite.
So Zoé-Loes has a lot to live up to just by fate of geographical circumstance, and she does just that.
She says ‘Changing colour’ was written “to reach out to people who have also been through big changes in their life” and that it has a lot of emotions that she hopes “will resonate with people and maybe even give them comfort.”
It is a simple change of seasons song, the cold of winter melting like the ice in her heart to be replaced by the budding greenery of spring. A perfect song for the time of year.
I must admit that the ‘icy heart’ threw me as I began to look for a relationship that was also thawing out but it turned out to be a red herring, and refers only to her changing state of mind.
Zoé-Loes performs it very well and believably, by which I mean that you can appreciate the concept that it is written to help others through the winter of their lives as she said.
There’s a beautiful melody and her voice suits it perfectly. If Cyndi Lauper hadn’t written ‘True Colours’ I would have suggested she tried this song instead!
The only little fault I can find with it is that the ending is sudden and unexpected when there’s an opportunity to play out with a little piano coda but in the greater scheme of things that amounts to nothing.
There’s a line, “the greenery finally taking a hold on me” which reminds me that some of her press shots reveal it has spread to her hair and that Ms Lauper had green hair too.
Perhaps we’re in at the start of something big here?
Find her on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Zolomusikk/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zoe_loes/
