Misty Lanes Colourless Green Ideas

Misty Lanes is the moniker for the solo recording project of Sydney based multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, engineer and producer, Steven W. Schouten. Beginning in 2017 after releasing his self-titled album, Misty Lanes has become defined by reverberating guitars, punchy drums, dreamy organ melodies and delicate vocals that embody the soul of cult-classic late 1960s bands such as The 13th Floor Elevators and The Kinks.

The idea for Misty Lanes’ new album came about after Steven W. Schouten stumbled on a sentence — “Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously” — a grammatical yet semantically nonsensical phrase by American author/linguist, Noam Chomsky. The phrase got Steven thinking about how we are always searching for meaning in things but not everything needs meaning and can just exist — “art for art’s sake”. This idea was the driving force behind Misty Lanes’ forthcoming sophomore album, Colourless Green Ideas, with the record being an eclectic collection of songs that explores a plethora of sounds and sub-genres from psychedelic rock, baroque pop, outsider folk, krautrock, funk infused garage-rock and more. The album was written, recorded and pieced together between 2016-2021 in different home studios before Schouten finished up the mixing in 2022.