B-Side Guys

Musicians who start as instrumentalists often bring distinctive perspectives when they step forward as songwriters. Dylan DeBiase—a bassist who claimed the 2018 International Solo Bass Competition and toured with Grammy winner Victor Wooten—emerges with “Color Your Devil,” a track that defies conventional genre boundaries while exploring existential terrain with remarkable nuance.

The song inhabits the liminal space between religious questioning and secular longing, creating an emotional landscape where spiritual traditions and personal desires exist in productive tension. Opening with a direct appeal for divine favor “in time everlasting,” DeBiase immediately establishes the spiritual framework that will be complicated throughout the track. This juxtaposition creates the song’s central emotional friction—a protagonist simultaneously seeking divine guidance while acknowledging desires that might fall outside traditional religious boundaries.

What distinguishes “Color Your Devil” within the crowded emo-adjacent landscape is how it refuses easy resolution to these tensions. The recurring instruction to “color your devil” suggests both personalization of one’s darker impulses and the creative transformation of them—finding beauty in aspects of self that might be considered transgressive. When DeBiase admits to being “at an impasse, trying my best to know what’s right,” he captures the universal experience of moral uncertainty without defaulting to either dogmatic certainty or nihilistic rejection.

The production balances the intimacy of bedroom indie with moments of post-rock expansiveness, creating dynamic shifts that mirror the song’s thematic oscillation between constraint and release. DeBiase’s background as a bassist is evident in the track’s thoughtful low-end architecture, which provides emotional foundation rather than mere rhythmic support.

Most poignant is the recurring image of wanting to “die in the sunshine,” a phrase that transforms traditional religious imagery of heavenly light into something more terrestrial and immediate. This yearning for natural transcendence rather than supernatural salvation speaks to contemporary spiritual searching that honors traditional frameworks while expanding beyond them.

For a musician with technical virtuosity (evidenced by his competition win and association with bass legend Wooten), DeBiase shows remarkable restraint, allowing emotional resonance rather than instrumental prowess to drive the narrative. The result is a song that respects both the precision of his instrumental background and the messy complexity of human spiritual questioning.

“Color Your Devil” ultimately captures what DeBiase himself describes as “moving through life and trying to find a way to explore your desires, decision making and who you want to be in the world while everything feels like it’s flowing against you”—a sentiment that transcends any single religious tradition while honoring the human need for meaning in an often-chaotic existence.