The Red Strokes
| "The Red Strokes" | ||||||||
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| Single by Garth Brooks | ||||||||
| from the album In Pieces | ||||||||
| B-side | "Burning Bridges" | |||||||
| Released | November 15, 1994 | |||||||
| Format |
CD Single cassingle 7" 45 RPM |
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| Genre | Country rock | |||||||
| Length | 3:44 (album version) | |||||||
| Label | Liberty | |||||||
| Writer(s) | James Garver, Lisa Sanderson, Jenny Yates, Garth Brooks | |||||||
| Producer(s) | Allen Reynolds | |||||||
| Garth Brooks singles chronology | ||||||||
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"The Red Strokes" is a single by country music artist Garth Brooks from his album, In Pieces. While only charting on the country charts in the U.S. (#49) and Canada (#38) as an album cut, it became one of his most popular songs in the United Kingdom, peaking at #13. This song has not been featured on any of Brooks's greatest hits albums in the United States. The video, however, was included in The Entertainer DVD box set.
"The Red Strokes" is a mid-tempo love ballad played predominantly on the piano and electric guitar. The narrator describes a romantic interlude in the form of a painting using multiple related metaphors: "Inspired by a vision that they can't command", "erasing the borders with each brush of a hand". Some oxymoronic elements are also present "Thundering moments of tenderness rage", "Tempered and strong" and "Burning the night like the dawn". The writer concludes with color metaphors: "the blues will be blue", and "jealousies green" but most importantly "when LOVE picks its shade it demands to be seen", inferring RED. As a final note, one of the themes of the piece is that the passions within us need to be restrained, and that two of the times it is proper to let them out, are when two people are in LOVE, or in a piece of art.
According to Garth, in his linear notes for the UK version of The Hits album, which included the song due to its huge success there, the song originated as a poem sent to him from Paris by Lisa Sanderson, one of the co-writers of the song. Lisa wrote that she had written the poem after seeing a piece of artwork at The Louvre. "The piece was nothing but a bunch of brush strokes" she wrote. "The most prominent strokes were done in red and it made me think, if I were to look at my life and paint it like this, with red representing my life's loves, heartaches, and passionate moments, how many red strokes would it have?" The lyrics themselves, according to both Sanderson and Brooks, don't differentiate much from that original poem.
The video opens with an all-white room. As the music begins to play, Brooks is shown rising out of the floor from a red puddle like it was water in an all-white suit and barefoot sitting at a white piano. As the music builds up, the different colors of paint represented (red, blue, and green) are splashed across him and the piano. During the guitar solo, another Brooks is standing over the first Brooks on the piano wearing a black and red outfit. The video ends with him in a final all white scene, with the fade out done as red paint (digitally inserted) runs down the screen.
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Wikipedia