The making of "She comes in colors" by LOVE

Love’s ornate third single marked a progression from their garage band beginnings. 

Love’s reputation rests on their dazzling third album, 1967’s Forever Changes. But the journey there involved several different stops. Not least among these is “She Comes In Colors” - a jazzier, flute- and harpsichord-peppered Arthur Lee composition from 1966’s Da Capo. The Los Angeles band’s second album - named after a musical term meaning “back to the beginning” - took a pivotal step on the odyssey from their eponymous debut’s garage rock towards an ornate, psychedelic form of rock’n’roll. “The first album was more minimalist, with everything recorded live,” recalls guitarist Johnny Echols, sipping ginger beer on a tour bus in Leeds, shortly before performing the hallowed catalogue with The Love Band. “But Da Capo was a more grown-up album. We wanted to push the envelope. I’m very proud of ‘She Comes In Colors’, because we’d been known as a garage rock band but suddenly jazz musicians would come up to us and ask, ‘How on earth did you guys come up with that..?’”

The seeds of this adventure had been sown shortly before the main album sessions, when Love entered Sunset Sound Recorders studio one with producer Jac Holzman and engineer Bruce Botnick to laydown “7 And 7 Is”, a hurtling proto-punk number that would become their first - and only - American Top 40 single (reaching No 33).

“That single was very different from the song Arthur had written,” says Echols, explaining that it had started out as “a kind of Dylanesque folk song about Arthur, very autobiographical”. As he explains it, an endorsement deal with Vox meant they could try out pioneering new effects, such as a tremolo box for a guitar and distortion pedal for the bass. 

The results gave them the confidence to experiment even more, changing producers, studios and engineers for Da Capo and blossoming with “She Comes In Colors”. Receiving little airplay outside the LA area on release in 1966, the song wasn’t a hit but has had quite an afterlife. The Rolling Stones quoted it - “She comes in colors everywhere” - uncredited, in 1967 single “She’s A Rainbow”. The Hoosiers covered it and Janet Jackson sampled it. Even Madonna borrowed from it - unwittingly - on 1999 hit “Beautiful Stranger”, with producer William Orbit later admitting borrowing from the melody. “Arthur got credit for that,” smiles Echols. “The whole group should have been credited really, but the acknowledgement was nice.”