npm pmmu #7: colorful

This month I'm posting daily Poetry-Music Match-Ups, and you're invited to join me! (See the bottom of the post  for ideas.)  When I don't have a crowd-sourced combo scheduled, I'll share one of my own many, many PMMUs!  If something comes to your mind, send it to me HERE.


So, long ago I made the acquaintance of one Mitch Friedman, who has spent his life putting words and music together in the best handmade way.  I asked him to send me a match-up and he obliged with a favorite lyric from his children's album (beloved by our family during the goldfish-littered-minivan era) and someone else's song.

Color Feel || Mitch Friedman

Green gets me green with envy
blue makes me blue
red and I'm more than ready
to be like you

yellow and all my fellow senses warm up
aquamarine is sunscreen to make them stop

See the best I get is a color feel
and colors feel alright
yeah the best I get is a color feel
and colors feel out of sight!

Now I know that the world is not so
black and white for real
'cause the colors
oh the colors
yeah the colors,
how good they feel, oh . . .

Pink if a tulip and a tool looked the same?
Orange you glad an orange looks like its name?
Brown and I'm bround to groan and feel like dirt
purple's purplexing and makes me want to blurt

If the best you get is a color feel
well colors feel alright
yeah the best I get is a color feel
and colors feel out of sight!

 ******************

Mitch matches his lyric with this song from They Might Be Giants' album Here Comes Science (2009).

But I have to include Mitch's song too, which is whimsical and beautiful and, appropriately, full of emotions, including a wistful sadness, because Purple Burt is both invisible and color blind.  Read to the bottom of that linked page for interesting musician information!

I could listen to this a thousand times, really.  Words are all fine and good, said the poet, but words PLUS music?  What a really great idea, early humans!