Arima Ederra started writing her debut, An Orange Colored Day, after an especially poignant afternoon in the park with a group of friends who had each lost a parent. As the sun was setting, painting the field before them orange, two friends jumped from a tree and started running. Ederra jumped after them, and soon after, she wrote “Free Again,” a warm, exploratory song that revels in the freedom and safety of childhood. The song’s ethos—optimistic but informed by a sadness right outside the frame—defines the album. These soft, reggae-inflected R&B lullabies insist on cherishing beauty, even when Ederra has to find and create it for herself.
Throughout the album, Ederra situates specific imagery about love and yearning in a cocoon of wonder and gratitude, signaled by gentle guitar melodies, crystalline steel drum tones, and twinkling keys. Grief and joy are especially intertwined in the way Ederra sings about her family. “Drugz/Wooden Wheel,” written after Ederra spent her last $50 on a gift for her mother, transforms a moment of anxiety into a meditation on familial gratitude. She sings, “I can’t buy drugs, I spent my money on my mama/I bought her roses by the dozen, she lives for me and my brother.” She builds up momentum, quickening her vocal delivery as she repeats “Girl, what you crying for?/It’s coming back to you now.” “Yellow Cabi,” a gentle piano ballad, is a beautiful tribute to her late father, who was a cab driver. Her voice is tender and honeyed as she details his late nights driving alone, providing for his family. These meandering, golden songs flit between the autobiographical, which can be lonely and heavy, and the fantastical, which serves as an emotional foil and a reprieve.
Despite its themes of loss, Ederra’s music maintains a sense of hope. Her songs often take on a prayer-like tone, allowing her to think beyond immediate circumstances. “Faith is what makes us beautiful,” she explains, “like being able to see the unimaginable, or being able to believe that things can be better.” Opener “Letters From the Imaginary” establishes a wonderstruck tone with its shimmering harp and cloudlike layered vocals. Ederra invites us to jump head-first into her dreamy narrative: “Take my hand now,” she sings. “I’ll show you worlds above the clouds.” “Dual Skies” is about someone mourning the loss of a younger brother. But it’s also one of the most triumphant songs on the album: Ederra’s voice is eager and determined as she sings over a bright, staccato synth tone. She again uses the language of the imaginary to assert that love transcends time and space, existing eternally between the people who have shared it, even when they “love between dual skies.”
Like a potter pulling shapes out of clay, Ederra reaches into the haze of grief and unearths new visions of her future that are full of beauty and emotional safety. Engaging in fantasy can sometimes feel like escapism, but here it is an act of self-determination. In “An Orange Colored Day,” she uses particularly ornate imagery—tranquil gold faces, love beaming through cracks in windows, a heaven soft as skin—to reposition loss as an opportunity to honor enduring love. Ederra chooses to remain hopeful in these moments, to prioritize a version of herself who has grown around and through her pain, even when that person can feel far away, like a figment of her imagination.
