It seems like forever since Bon Iver released their debut album For Emma, Forever Ago (2007), but some of the lyrics have never left Rakewell’s memory. Among them is a line from ‘Flume’, a paean to singer-songwriter Justin Vernon’s mother, in which he sings about love being maroon. He seems to have softened his palette of late: the cover of the band’s latest album, Sable, Fable, is light pink, and the group have teamed up with Pantone, the self-appointed authority on all things chromatic, to promote the creation of a ‘new official colour’: ‘fABLE Salmon’.
The band have been tight-lipped on whether their sudden attraction to this colour has stemmed from an intensely pescetarian diet or a recent subscription to the Financial Times, but they seem to have fallen for it hard: according to a press release the colour has ‘has illustrated and defined the surrounding world’ of the album. Vernon in particular has thrown himself into fABLE Salmon, dressing head to toe in pink custom-made garments and posing with a 13kg fish to demonstrate allegiance to his new favourite hue.
It’s not the first time musicians have embraced the potential of colour – or the lack of it. After the maximalism of Peter Blake’s design for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the rainbow vibes of Magical Mystery Tour (1967), the Beatles pared things back for the sleeve of their eponymous album (1968), which was entirely off-white with the band’s name embossed – also in white – off-centre. The music on The Beatles may have been kaleidoscopic, but fans soon began calling it ‘the White Album’, a name that has stuck fast – testament to the power of colour.
Prince must have been taking notes: he followed up his magnificent double-album Sign o’ the Times (1987) with The Black Album, which came with no reference to the artist, album name or production credits anywhere on the sleeve. If Prince had had Bon Iver’s nous for corporate collaboration he might have teamed up with Surrey NanoSystems to unveil Vantablack as a tie-in with the album; he would surely have done more for the colour than Anish Kapoor, who since 2014 has had exclusive rights to use Vantablack in artistic applications.
Prince swiftly pulled The Black Album from distribution, convinced that it was ‘evil’, which cleared the way for Jay-Z to release an album of the same name in 2003. And though Hova did not have quite the same faith in colour, plastering a shadowy image of his face on the cover, Danger Mouse restored the primacy of monochrome: The Grey Album, his masterful (though technically illegal) mash-up of The Beatles and Jay-Z’s Black Album, arrived in 2004 in a plain grey sleeve.
If Bon Iver are taking their dedication to a single colour further than any of these artists, albeit with less historical significance, perhaps we can look to the band Eiffel 65 for clues as to why. In the Europop earworm ‘I’m Blue’ (1999), frontman Jeffrey Jey suggests what it might be like to live inside an Yves Klein painting, singing of a world in which everything is blue – including himself. Just as the word ‘blue’ evokes a feeling as well as a colour, perhaps with Bon Iver’s help the word ‘salmon’ will one day take on an emotional resonance all of its own.