Listen...

Hey, another great Season One Jingle is up on YoGabbaGabba.com: the animated music video "Listen" - animated by the crazily talented Lori D., from a song by the band Paco (a side project of the husband and wife that make up two-thirds of the band Ivy.)


The song, and the animation, are a perfect reminder of how important it is - and how much fun it can be - to stop and listen to the things all around us.

And noone knows that better than Lori D. herself! Here's what she told us about how she made the animation:

"I was living on a pistachio farm when I made the "Listen" animation. I started working on this animation during the early summer. As I was developing the treatment for the animation, I had a helpful listening experience. One day, in the late afternoon, I started hearing something knocking on the roof above me... Like someone knocking on a door. I couldn't figure out what was making that sound! It was happening every day for weeks. Then one day I noticed there were lots of pistachio shells scattered on the ground around the front porch and I realized the birds were picking pistachios out of the orchard and taking them up to the roof of the house to peck them open! That was what the knocking sound was....and then the shells would just roll off the edge of the roof onto the ground.

I thought about how that gave me a whole new level of understanding of how listening was a tool I hadn't thought of before that enables a person to intimately get to know the subtle seasonal indicators in the place that they live. I found out by listening that if I hear a bird pecking pistachio shells open on a roof, I can learn from the birds that the pistachios are getting ripe enough to start eating! I thought it was exciting that even though I don't speak bird language, the birds could tell me it was pistachio chowdown showdown time, even if I hadn't been out there in the orchard to see for myself.

That was a big part of what gave me the idea to create ribbons of visualized sound pattern and then follow them to eventually reveal the source of the mystery."

Here's some of the early artwork Lori D. started with when she was making the animation:

Man, that station wagon is so cool!

More from Lori D.:

"I was really excited to create an animation to accompany the "Listen" song. I loved the song and the idea of celebrating the importance and pleasure of actively listening to our world and the people who are in our lives. I had been thinking a lot about how our imaginations ignite when we listen. If there are sounds that we recognize, we use our memories to paint pictures in our minds of what would be making that sound. If we do not recognize the sound, our imaginations piece together wild patchwork quilts of possibilities based on the things that we do know about the world from our experience in it.

So for the fantastic new people of the world, such as are many of the fans of Yo Gabba Gabba, I was thrilled to make an animation that explored the bounty of possibilities for learning about the way things work through listening."

The "Listen" jingle, from Season One.
CLICK HERE to watch - and listen... (Shhh)