Lena Raine’s work on Celeste was the subject of my very first (!) article on this site. You can read it here if you’re interested in checking it out.

Since discovering Celeste in late 2020, I’ve been curiously watching her career. It wasn’t long before a couple of her major upcoming projects were on my radar, the first of which is the subject of this installment of Modding the Score– Chicory: A Colorful Tale.

The game was developed by Greg Lobanov, an indie developer based in Canada, and was released earlier in the year. It tells the story of a dog who takes up a magical brush with the ability to paint the world in colors after its wielder, Chicory, has disappeared and the world is rendered colorless.

Full disclosure here– at the time of writing this, I haven’t finished the game, and probably won’t have either by the time this goes up. It was actually listening to the album that compelled me to seek out the game, which I have been thoroughly enjoying. Now here’s a playlist of the music!

As usual, stay after the jump for the BTS.

TRACKLIST
1. Blank Canvas
2. The Town of Luncheon
3. Supper Woods
4. Eyes in the Darkness
5. Potluck
6. Probably Ancient Evil
7. Chicory’s Theme
8. Sips River
9. Erase You
10. Dinners, The Big City
11. Teatime Meadows
12. uoY mA I
13. Abandon Me
14. Dessert Mountain
15. Song of the Wielders
16. More Than Myself
17. MONSTER
18. The Wielders’ Legacy
19. The Dark Forest
20. Something New
21. History Against Us
22. Do the Impossible
23. The Mountain Top
24. This Colorful World

Behind the Scenes

One unexpected perk of Game Music Hub still being so early in its infancy is that everything is the most or least of anything. Which is why I can still get away so easily with stuff being the hardest or easiest thing to tackle. I just don’t have a lot of things to compare anything to yet. In time, I’m sure such hyperbolic expressions will fade away from my writing, which is probably for the best.

This is all just a protracted prelude to say that, in contrast to Immortals Fenyx Rising being a particularly hard playlist to pin down, Chicory: A Colorful Tale was probably the easiest.

The story behind how it was put together is actually not that interesting.

I did start by overcomplicating myself, thinking of the ways I could offer a different experience from Raine’s original album. I tried doing crazy changes to the track order, but I quickly found out that it wasn’t working. I wasn’t really feeling any of the changes I was trying to make.

So in order to get a new perspective, I went back to the basics, and tried for a simple abridged playlist, resulting in the exact same tracks that ended up in this final version.

From there, I understood that the best thing I could possibly do to do this score justice was to just stay out of the way and let Lena Raine tell her musical story. The power behind the emotional journey that she was telling with her music was undeniable, and I was messing with it.

So I ended up making this a simple highlights playlist intended as an introduction for those who wouldn’t normally want to listen to a 150-minute album, which is admittedly a taste inherited from film music.

The only change I made was moving up Chicory’s Theme, as I felt like I needed to introduce it earlier while also needing an extra track to space out Probably Ancient Evil and Erase You.

While this playlist may fall much more on the side of redundancy than the others I’ve made for this site, because it doesn’t offer a wildly different experience from the main album, I still felt compelled to publish it, if only because of how much of a fan I am of this score and Lena Raine as a whole.

Right now, Chicory: A Colorful Tale comfortably sits as my favorite game score of the year, and playing through the game just makes me fall in love with it more. The music is filled with so much life, vibrancy, color and creativity that is hard to look away, and behind all of that is a carefully constructed and moving thematic narrative that just compels me to keep listening for the little details and be rewarded every time I find something new.

My very first article for Celeste closed out with a promise I made of celebrating Lena Raine’s music, so the bottom line of this is that if, by some measure, this playlist helps someone discover Chicory and listen to the full album, or even better, play the game, then I will have accomplished my objective.

Of course, once I finish playing through Chicory, there may be proper articles dedicated to it. My mind is already going through the possibilities.

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CHICORY: A COLORFUL TALE
Music by Lena Raine
Mixed by Lena Raine
The Mountain Top mixed by Masahiro Aoki
Mastered by Jeff Galindo
Featured performances by Lena Raine, Kristin Naigus, Michaela Nachtigall, SungHa Hong, Stemage, Kevin Ragone, Carlos ‘insanetherain’ Eiene & Emi Evans
You can get the album here: https://radicaldreamland.bandcamp.com/album/chicory-a-colorful-tale-original-soundtrack