Primary Colors of the Cure - Part 1

Color plays a huge part in helping to set the tone for many of The Cure's songs. From somber to upbeat, the world through the eyes of Robert Smith is awash in color, and colors in the world of the Cure are very closely tied to the emotional content of the songs themselves.

If you can, try to imagine the color references removed in lyrics such as those in "From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea" or "Watching Me Fall" and you can get a sense of how important color can be in adding meaning to these songs.

In the music of The Cure, the colors gray, black, red and white are often used in connection with emotions such as despair, anger, fear or hostility, while green and blue are more commonly associated with songs involving love and relationships, good or bad.

Here are ten of my favorite color-associated Cure songs. What are some of yours?

1. From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea
2. One Hundred Years
3. Watching Me Fall
4. All Cats are Grey
5. A Short Term Effect
6. Caterpillar
7. Burn
8. Gone
9. Primary
10. Wrong Number


Finally, if you'd like to explore further into the colors of the Cure's songs, here is a tool called a Word Tree, into which you can enter various words and see what other words are linked to it. Type a color word such as blue, green or red into the text box and you can immediately see which lyrics contain it. This also works for other words such as love, hate, anger, kiss, dream, ocean, etc. The number in the upper left corner indicates how many times the word appears in the document.
Have fun!



The data feeding this little application is the same Cure Lyrics document I used in the 13 Impossible Words post.