Purr "Giant Night"

About The Artist

Between 1966 and 1970, the American artist Barnett Newman painted a series of four large scale paintings titled Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue. They’re simple, but produce a whole register of feelings, emotions — the color is the subject, the paintings do not represent anything, but only express themselves. How can a canvas saturated in red synthesize something as complicated as fear? It just does. That painting series’ title was a reference to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a play from the 60s by Edward Albee, which was in itself a reference to "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?", the song from the 30s immortalized in Disney cartoons.

These Newman paintings are the conceptual backdrop of ‘Who Is Afraid of Blue?,’ the sophomore album of lifelong New Yorkers Eliza Barry Callahan and Jack Staffen’s project Purr. It is in many ways a record about these abstract registers of fear — saturated with emotion, introspection, and that very sense of overwhelm.

Callahan and Staffen started writing this record in late 2019, shortly before the release of ‘Like New,’ the group’s debut, and following shows supporting acts from Weyes Blood to Maggie Rogers. But just as they began writing, Callahan started to suddenly and rapidly lose her hearing. She was told she could be deaf in a year’s time. It did not seem like there was a cure. 2020 rolled around, the duo canceled their tour so she could take care of her health. A few weeks later, the pandemic began. In the following months, it seemed improbable that they’d write music together again. Callahan couldn’t be around music anymore; it became too painful.

“Music became a live wire,” she says, “it wasn’t physically bearable.” These events took their own toll on Staffen too. The duo had a reckoning with their art. They shelved the few things they had begun to write. Callahan focused on finding a way to get better. A year later she entered a medical trial and months later against odds entered remission. Then the pandemic started to lift. They got back to work. “We began working together again, intensely and quickly,” the pair says, “It was a life leveling moment, an opening moment. Time suddenly felt way more valuable.” They made what would become the record from start to finish in half a year. Enter ‘Blue.’

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