Singled Out: Greek Fire Cover Of True Colors

12-02-2018

Greek Fire recently captured a lot of attention with their cover of Cyndi Lauper's "True Colors" and we asked vocalist/guitarist Moon about the track. Here is the story:

Greek Fire's take on the old Cyndi Lauper classic "True Colors," it's actually a funny story of how it came to be. We'd done some covers in the past, and we really enjoyed doing one-off cover versions of things in our very own style live. But we'd only ever done one on record at the time and that was a David Bowie track on our record LOST. We really made it our own and almost made it sound very Rage Against The Machine.

We had a PledgeMusic campaign at the time, just like we do now for BROKEN and one of the incentives for people was if they pledged for the record, they got to pick any song for the band to do an acoustic cover version of. We did a couple of them, I think we did like 4 or 5, including a Smashing Pumpkins song. Then somebody said: "How about Cyndi Lauper's 'True Colors'?" As we were arranging it acoustically, I kind of decided, "Hey, maybe this is a cool idea to record."

In the studio with our good friend Matt, who was engineering some of the songs that we were doing at the time, we kind of pieced it together really fast. He asked me the question: What would you want to make it sound like if you did "True Colors" on record?

I wanted to serve the Cyndi Lauper vocal line, and the Phil Collins vocal line because that's the one that I actually heard more of and first when I was a kid. But I wanted to make it our own and almost make it sound like a movie soundtrack. Very cinematic and different. Different types of drums than the Phil Collins one, different sort of feel than the Cyndi Lauper, soft-spoken one.

That's what I did. I sat down with a piano, hammered out some of the lines. We put some synths underneath it and sort of built the feeling of it. And then we did the vocals. it all came together pretty magically and pretty easily. We were so stoked with it that we knew that it was going to be on a record some day.

So we put it on BROKEN. You can preorder the record and actually get our "True Colors" cover, download it instantly.

We just did a video for it that is super cool, we partnered with an arts hotel in St. Louis - this one of a kind, unique hotel. Every single room is a different color, from the furniture to the walls to the bed to the accents. Everything in the room is one color. We did 4 vignettes just showing different experiences that humans will go through: happiness, sadness, love, depression. Everything that represents what the song represents. It's this positive, reinforced "we're all in this together and I'm here for you, and you can be yourself" type of song and type of sentiment. The video plays perfectly with that.

I'm just proud and honored that we fell into a situation, thanks to one of our good friends and fans, to do a song that's so iconic and so meaningful and so good for the world, no matter what decade it comes out of.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen for yourself and learn more right here!