“The 2009 album Numbers, Colors and People (recorded in one day at Philip Glass’s studio) is all instrumental piano and the album’s standout track Mint Green would go on to define Shapiro’s early career. The track is a furtive, arcing and pacey piano solo which rises and falls delicately, its melody slowly emerging from a Debussy-like haze of almost-hesitancy. No matter how many times it’s heard you have to return to its cascading style.
Mint Green’s astonishing success on the Internet and as a regular soundtrack on American television belies its origins; Mint Green was directly inspired by the Cocteau Twins’s track My Truth from their 1993 album Four-Calendar Café.”
-Mark Prendergast, author, The Ambient Century
Andrew Shapiro writes:
I was a young artist making my first album and was amazed a piece of art-music could find the reception that it did. But it was in the way that it did I continue to find fascinating.
Mint Green, an ode to mint chocolate chip ice cream, has resonated with fans of a number of disparate artists and genres. It’s Classical, Ambient, Emo, Pop and Trance simultaneously. One could make the case that this is really a piece of Electronica realized by a human on a piano…
When the piece reached into mainstream territory -initially on Coldplay’s Pandora station- I started hearing from people all over the world. Here I’ve created a remastered and shortened version (four minutes); the one I play on TV and in other appearances.