Terry Callier’s What Color Is Love: Why This Forgotten Soul-Jazz Classic Still Feels Like a Discovery
Some albums announce what they are in the first thirty seconds. You know the category, the era, the mood, maybe even the sentence you would use to describe them before the side is over.
Terry Callier’s What Color Is Love is not that kind of record.
The first thing you notice is probably Callier’s voice: warm, weathered, intimate, full of thought. Then the arrangements start working on you. Soul is in there, absolutely, but it keeps opening into jazz, folk, and something more searching that never sits still long enough to be pinned down. By the time the album really settles in, you’re no longer asking “What genre is this?” You’re asking the better question: why does this feel so alive?
That’s the magic of What Color Is Love.
It doesn’t sound like a “lost masterpiece” in the flashy, collector-bait sense. It’s not trying to overwhelm you with rarity or importance, but it certainly gets under your skin. The songs are thoughtful without turning stiff, spiritual without floating away, and musically rich without ever sounding like they’re trying to impress you with how rich they are.
And once this album really clicks, it becomes hard to understand how Terry Callier isn’t part of more everyday music conversations. If you care about soul, jazz, singer-songwriters, or records that create a whole emotional atmosphere, What Color Is Love is the kind of album that can go from “interesting recommendation” to “why is this suddenly one of my favorite records?” very quickly.
Why What Color Is Love by Terry Callier Sounds Unlike Almost Anything Else
One of the best things about this album is that it keeps changing shape while it plays.
You can call it a soul album, and you would not be wrong. There’s warmth in the voice, in the groove, in the emotional center of the whole record. But “soul” doesn’t quite cover it. There’s too much openness in the songwriting and drift in the arrangements.
Jazz is in the bloodstream too. You hear it in the patience of the record. These songs aren’t in a hurry. They stretch out just enough to create their own weather. Then there’s the folk side, not as some neat genre label, but in the bones of the writing. Terry Callier sings like someone trying to tell the truth before he worries about making a grand statement.
That’s what makes What Color Is Love feel so natural. It doesn’t sound like a self-conscious fusion project. It sounds like one artist whose musical instincts are simply bigger than the categories people might try to hand him.
And that may be one reason the album feels so fresh now. We’re much more open these days to records that move across styles without announcing the crossing every five minutes. What Color Is Love isn’t eclectic for the sake of being eclectic, it’s just expansive in its DNA.
Terry Callier’s Voice Is the Heart of the Album
A lesser singer could have focused on making this record feel tasteful, whereas Terry Callier only cares about staying true to his emotions.
His voice is such a huge part of why the album lingers. He sings with warmth, but also with a kind of inward gravity that gives the songs real shape. He never sounds like he’s trying to overpower the material. He sounds like he trusts it, and that trust gives the music room to breathe.
He can be tender without getting hazy and reflective without turning bloodless. There’s always real feeling in the performance, but it never feels pushed at you. That matters because What Color Is Love could easily have tipped into over-refined “important album” territory in the wrong hands. Instead, it keeps a pulse. Even at its most meditative, it feels lived in.
And the mood is part of the album’s power too. This is not a heavy record, but it has weight. It’s not a sad record, exactly, but there are shadows moving around the edges. It’s not a devotional record, but there is a spiritual restlessness in it, a sense of someone asking larger questions without pretending to have neat answers.
Even the title tells you a lot. What Color Is Love is not the title of an album interested in certainty. It is interested in wonder.
The Best Songs on What Color Is Love
This is absolutely an album you should hear straight through, but a few tracks make especially good entry points if you want to understand the spell it casts.
“Dancing Girl”
If I had to play one song for someone and say, “Here, this is why Terry Callier matters,” this would be near the top of the list.
“Dancing Girl” doesn’t come at you all at once. It eases open, then slowly expands until you realize you’re fully inside its atmosphere. The groove is there, but it doesn’t lock the song into one obvious lane. The arrangement keeps breathing. Callier’s phrasing somehow feels grounded and floating at the same time, which is one of the strangest and best things about his singing.
It’s a long enough song to build its own world, and that’s exactly what it does.
“What Color Is Love”
The title track is one of those songs built around a question that sounds simple until you actually sit with it.
What makes it so beautiful is that it never tries to solve the question too neatly. It stays open, curious, a little elusive. Terry Callier isn’t delivering a slogan about love. He’s circling it, feeling his way around it, turning it toward the light.
That same openness is in the music too. The arrangement gives the song space instead of hemming it in. It’s tender, reflective, and a little mysterious. The kind of song that makes you want to start it over the second it ends.
“You Goin’ Miss Your Candyman”
One of the pleasures of this album is that it doesn’t get trapped in one mood, and this song proves it.
There’s a groove here that reminds you that What Color Is Love isn’t only reflective or spiritually searching. It can move with real confidence too. The record never loses its depth, but it also never mistakes seriousness for stiffness.
That flexibility is part of why the album feels so complete.
“Ho Tsing Mee (A Song of the Sun)”
This is one of the songs that really makes you understand how hard Terry Callier is to reduce.
There’s an exploratory quality to it that feels guided by instinct rather than formula. It reaches outward, but never in a way that feels pretentious or overdesigned. There’s lift in it, and a kind of searching energy that says a lot about Callier as an artist. If you love albums that feel like they’re discovering themselves as they go, this is one of the songs that will probably seal the deal.
Why Terry Callier’s What Color Is Love Was Overlooked
It’s always tempting to come up with one clean reason a great album slipped through the cracks, but it’s usually a messier story than that.
Still, part of the answer seems obvious enough in that Terry Callier didn’t fit a tidy commercial category. He was too fluid. Too soulful for some lanes, too folk-rooted for others, too inward for straightforward pop packaging, too musically expansive to be reduced to one easy image.
Artists like that often get their fullest audience later.
And in a way, that makes sense. What Color Is Love feels like the kind of album listeners grow into. Its mix of soul, jazz, folk, intimacy, groove, and spiritual reach makes immediate sense now, maybe more than it would have in a market that wanted cleaner labels and faster hooks.
But classification alone doesn’t explain why the album still pulls people in.
The deeper reason is simpler: it’s just incredibly good company.
Some records survive because they became monuments. Others survive because each new listener has the same reaction: how did this miss me for so long?
Why You Should Listen to What Color Is Love Now
Because it still feels alive.
Because it still sounds like someone trying to say something real without flattening that reality into cliché. Because it has warmth without vagueness, depth without stiffness, and craft without self-importance. Because it feels grounded and searching at the same time, which is one of the rarest combinations music can pull off.
And because the best forgotten albums don’t just earn your respect. They make you want to stay with them.
That’s what What Color Is Love does. It creates appetite. It makes you want to replay a song immediately. It makes you want to hear how Terry Callier bends a line one more time. It makes you want to understand why the arrangements feel both loose and exact. It makes you want to live inside the album rather than merely admire it.
That’s usually the sign you’ve found a record worth keeping.
Why What Color Is Love Deserves to Be Called a Forgotten Classic
There are albums that survive because listeners keep rediscovering them and having the same startled reaction: where has this been all my life?
Terry Callier’s What Color Is Love is that kind of album.
It isn’t “forgotten” because it’s minor. It’s “forgotten” because it never fit the easiest story. And in some ways, that may be exactly why it has aged so beautifully. Great albums that live between categories often keep their mystery. They don’t lose their power in overexposure. They stay open. They keep their pull.
If you’ve never heard it, don’t just admire its reputation from a distance. Put it on. Give it a few songs. Listen for the warmth in Callier’s voice, the patience in the arrangements, the way the whole record seems to drift and hold itself together at the same time.
Then see how long it takes before you want to start it over.
This essay is part of the Music Hidden Gems series, a growing archive of forgotten classics, underrated albums, and records that deserve another listen. Browse the full series here.
