You Look Nice Today

Many have asked, so here is the full story:

Our opening theme music is a track called “Pony Gallop (Morning Surprise),” by the Five Senses. They were a mostly-ukulele jam band out of Montréal, famous for their 4 hour sitar/uke trance sessions and subsequent pancake breakfasts. Sadly, their CD’s were deemed “obscene” by US Customs (a clerical error, one must assume), and all copies were destroyed at the border. Worse, the band had forgotten to hold on to the original recordings. 

The Five Senses finally disbanded when their entire tenor uke section disappeared while berrying in Greenland. Our possession of one tiny fragment of one song is pure luck: Merlin was working at the incinerator where the ill-fated CD’s were sent to be destroyed. He rescued one half-melted disc from the flames, and spent the next year piecing together the 1’s and 0’s—the digital scraps of the once-proud ukelele band’s magnum opus.

That year of labor yielded the song fragment you know as our opening theme. Gallop on, proud ukulelists. Gallop on.

YLNT listener Scott heard this story of courage and dedication, and came forward with his own Five Senses artifact. He owns what might be the only physical evidence that the band ever existed: a jewel case from their legendary performance at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal. Sadly, the music itself is lost.

Download “Pony Gallop (Morning Surprise).”

Photo: Mixed Spleens, The Five Senses