Grief doesn’t need to be loud to be heard. In “Blue,” the newest single from Chalumeau, it hums under every note like an undertow—subtle, persistent, inescapable. Written and performed by Katherine Bergeron and produced alongside her creative partner Butch Rovan, the track is the emotional core of their debut album, also titled Blue, and it arrives like a slow tide, sweeping listeners into its mournful, beautiful descent.
Bergeron, who penned the song following the death of her mother, doesn’t just write about grief — she inhabits it. The song opens with stark honesty: “Blue was my mother’s favorite color / I never thought it would be mine.” It’s a line that lands with devastating clarity, setting the stage for a ballad that resists melodrama and instead chooses intimacy. The piano carries the weight of the track with simple, arpeggiated lines that ripple like breath through the arrangement. There’s a deliberateness to every note, every pause, as if the song itself is learning how to speak again after a loss.
Musically, “Blue” is sparse but deeply considered. The instrumentation — piano, guitar, bass, drums — is bolstered by the aching voice of a cello, played by Ulrich Maiss, whose performance seems to bend time with its sadness. There’s a quiet bravery in the track’s restraint. Where other songs might reach for crescendos to express pain, Chalumeau lets silence and sustain do the heavy lifting.
The accompanying music video mirrors the song’s slow burn. A woman floats through memories, bathed in the visual language of the color blue — soft blues, ocean blues, the bruised hues of heartbreak. Maiss appears in a subtle cameo, his cello like an elegy in motion, while Bergeron’s late mother flickers into the frame via an old photograph. The effect isn’t theatrical — it’s haunting, like real grief is. You don’t watch the video so much as drift through it.
“Blue” is different from Chalumeau’s previous singles, which have drawn from harder-edged styles like rock, jazz-noir, and Afro-Latin grooves. But this pivot into quiet doesn’t feel like a departure — it feels like a homecoming. In fact, Bergeron notes that this was the track that gave the album its name before it was even written. It’s the wellspring from which everything else in Blue seems to flow.
The fact that the album is entirely self-produced makes the achievement all the more impressive. Bergeron and Rovan — both professors at Brown University — are proof that academic rigor and artistic vulnerability aren’t mutually exclusive. Their work together is precise, unflinching, and deeply human. You can feel the hours spent walking Rhode Island’s streets, the melodies shaped by solitude, the lyrics refined in shared silence.
Set for release on August 7, Blue promises a journey through love, politics, disillusionment, and resolve. Tracks like “No Common Ground” and “La Vérité” showcase Chalumeau’s stylistic range, but “Blue” is the moment the mask drops. It’s the quiet cry at the center of the storm. And sometimes, that’s the loudest thing a song can do.
