Orange You Glad?

When working with the orange noise, I thought of the associated ‘orange’ knock-knock joke, and then the line about door knockers from Young Frankenstein.

Next, I had to remember a bunch of other knock-knock jokes, specifically ones that had relatively short punchlines.

I structured the song as a sequence of pre-chorus and chorus pairs (without actual verses) to keep the melody relatively consistent, and used gospel and ‘work song’ call-and-response styles (among others) to help elicit more than one voice… a lead and a backing chorus.

I snorted when the singer used British/Posh/Minion pronunciation for ‘banana’ in “Orange you glad I didn’t say bah-nah-nah’?” I didn’t fiddle with the spelling of the lyrics or anything to get that effect… it just happened. I loved it so much that I was driven to go with that version.

Getting the song to preserve the integrity of each of the jokes was a delicate endeavor. They are spare, so messing up a word (or leaving out ‘who’) has a substantial impact. Much like the monster, then: a) this song is composed of parts gathered from many, many corpora, and b) like the so-called monster… it is beautiful, innocent, curious, and human.

Here are the lyrics.