Misty Lanes is the moniker of the solo recording project of Sydney based multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, engineer and producer, Steven W. Schouten. Beginning in 2017 after releasing their self-titled album, Misty Lanes is 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.

A long time coming since Misty Lanes’ 2017 self-titled album, Colourless Green Ideas sees Steven Schouten levelling up his songwriting, mixing and production, with new instruments such as his Mellotron Micro appearing all through the record. Both the songwriting and the production of the album nods to 1960s artists such as Brian Wilson, Billy Nicholls, The BeeGees, The 13th Floor Elevators and The Kinks. Schouten thoughtfully tries to stay true to the rawness of his ideas, which he calls “colourless green” — the naive first demo, which always captures the initial feeling of a song’s idea but is almost impossible to recreate in the studio environment.