January 30 - Orange Ball of Peace

Sometimes John will hit you with a song that's so simple that it wrongfoots you, and the straightforward pleasure of it will have you second guessing yourself. This song is small (1 minute 25) and doesn't need to be a second longer than it is. It's a thought and the answer to the thought, both of which work perfectly as they are.

There's a beautiful art to the small. The joke short story format of the drabble, the imposed limits of the perfect tweet, poetic forms such as haiku and limerick, all of these persist because their purpose is concentration and miniaturisation. What's the smallest form into which you can condense a moment, or a concept, or a life? How do you give just enough that the rest of it is obvious? And, as is crucial from this song, how do you make it funny?

"Funny" isn't actually an emotion, although it inspires many. You can be funny about the saddest thing in the world, the most horrifying. Being funny is about exploring and sitting in the incongruity, the way a story can change entirely on the particular meaning of one word.

What I'm trying to say is that this song is fire, man.