Yellow Things

I finished writing a very interesting and unique Nodal Nim song tonight (relative to my other songs at least)! It's a fifteen-minute collection of sub-songs on the subject of "things that are yellow," carefully strung together for coherency and storytelling. It's almost a whole new genre of song. I'm sure other people have done this before, but I haven't, and it's very exciting for me!

It begins and ends with a poem I borrowed from a Potsdam anthropology professor's two-year-old niece. According to the story my professor told (which was intended to demonstrate the incredible creativity of human beings as compared with other animals), her niece, while gazing at the moon one night, uttered the following:

There's a yellow man
on the yellow moon
reading a yellow book
about yellow things.

I think that statement is so full of wonder and amazing ideas, and I love that a two-year-old girl came up with it! I like the image we have, of a simple place, with a simple thing happening: one man, one moon, one book, one color even! It's just beautiful!

So in my song, the yellow man reads the yellow book, and in the yellow book, there are characters and events and emotions, and you experience the yellow man's reactions to it all. At the end of the song, the yellow man falls asleep to dream of yellow things. Interesting to me is that we have a fictional character reading about fictional characters, and to us, they're all equally fictional, but to the yellow man, he and his yellow moon are real while the yellow characters in the yellow book are fictional! I'm thinking about all the stuff in this song, and I'm so proud I wrote it, and it's just an amazing feeling! I can't wait to play it for somebody!