I saw part of a stale cookie on the sidewalk one day and imagined it's whole story. This is another song that came out of my frequent habit of looking at something small and weird and giving in an inner life. This one also started out as a fragment from along time ago. I loved the music so much that I stuck with it and now I love it! Maybe this song will help when the kids get grumpy at the beach?
It started out being about a family of bears in a river then changed many times before ending up being about staying cool in the summer sun. The lyrics to this song took a million years to figure out. Once we figured out that perspective the song sort of wrote itself. We came up with the idea of that lonesome rambler narrative like Roger Miller's KING OF THE ROAD. My brother Tim helped me out a lot with writing lyrics and focusing the feel of this song.
I didn't feel like it captured what I thought of and felt when I would see a balloon floating by itself across the sky. The Presidents had a song called LOOSE BALLOON that I wrote but I wasn't really happy with how it came out. I love the baritone saxophone in this one! Originally it was called "People All Over The World" but I changed it to "babies" because I am all about the little ones! I hope kids will listen to the song and imagine all the people all over the world and how everybody's doing something at every moment. I think I wrote both versions in the late 1980s. I combined two very old rough drafts of the same song together to make this one.