Published: Sun 15 September 2024
By Ian "polpo" Scott
In misc .
Who asked the famous question in the song Little Fluffy Clouds by The Orb? TL;DR: it's music writer Carl Arrington. Read on for more background.
The song "Little Fluffy Clouds" by The Orb is an electronic music classic with legendary status. Released in 1990, it has been remixed and reinterpreted countless times. Most versions of the song center around an extended vocal sample that starts with a question: "What were the skies like when you were young?" The question is answered by the singer Rickie Lee Jones, who gives a languid and dreamy recollection of the skies in her childhood home of Arizona that includes the phrase "little fluffy clouds," giving the song its name.
According to an oral history of Little Fluffy Clouds , the sample originally came to Youth , one of the song's co-producers, on a tape from a friend who worked in a record shop. This friend thought that an interview from a promo set for the album Flying Cowboys by Rickie Lee Jones could be made into a track and included it on the tape along with music by Steve Reich that was also sampled for the song.
While it's well established that Rickie Lee Jones is the answerer, the identity of the questioner hasn't been definitively answered. Many people think it's LeVar Burton, including The Orb's Alex Paterson himself, calling him "the bloke who played Geordi in Star Trek, The Next Generation" in the oral history and other interviews . However if you listen to more than just the "what were the skies like" question on the original source of the sample , it becomes increasingly apparent that it's not LeVar. The Flying Cowboys promo set has extensive liner notes, but there's no mention of who the interviewer is. Posts on The Orb mailing list from 1999 by someone who got the promo set because of its connection to The Orb corroborate that there's no additional info on the interviewer, and that it doesn't sound like LeVar. The Wikipedia page for Little Fluffy Clouds says it's not LeVar Burton but currently says the interviewer is unidentified.
When I was listening to a random mix of music a few weeks ago, Little Fluffy Clouds came up and I started thinking about this sample again and its source. Despite having no interest whatsoever in Rickie Lee Jones's music, I got the silly idea to track down a copy of the Flying Cowboys promo set and interview CD, which is titled A Conversation with Rickie Lee Jones . It took some sifting through copies of Flying Cowboys on eBay, but I found and purchased a complete copy of the promo set. So complete, it included something not mentioned by anyone else who had it: a letter from Geffen Records introducing the album to the people in the music industry that the set was sent to. In the letter is this nugget:
Enclosed is your limited edition Rickie Lee Jones boxed set containing the entire album, a conversation/interview cd with writer Carl Aarington (People, Us, Interview) , and a lyric/bio booklet.
So there you go, there's the interviewer identified! But that exact name doesn't really exist anywhere, and that's because Geffen made a typo: the interviewer's name is actually Carl Arrington. Carl Arrington was the music editor for People Magazine for years and was a prolific interviewer of musicians. A couple years ago he started a podcast of his past interviews called the Carl Arrington Archive and while the Rickie Lee Jones interview is not part of it, in a sizzle reel for the podcast he shows racks of cassette tapes of interviews with countless musicians and other celebrities, and there are five tapes with Jones's name written on them. That confirms he's interviewed her extensively.
The recordings in the Carl Arrington Archive aren't as high quality as the one in A Conversation with Rickie Lee Jones , and Arrington's voice ranges up and down quite a bit depending on who he's talking to or how the interview is going, so it's actually not immediately obvious it's the same person in both. However after listening to both a lot, I could tell that it's Carl Arrington in A Conversation With Rickie Lee Jones . His voice is pitched up pretty high when he asks the famous question (hence the LeVar Burton confusion) but in general he talks in a somewhat lower register.
I reached out to Carl Arrington via the podcast company to ask him to confirm that he is the interviewer in A Conversation with Rickie Lee Jones , but I've had no response yet. But I'm pretty satisfied with the conclusion that Carl Arrington is the person who asked "what were the skies like when you were young?"
I've ripped the interview CD and scanned all materials that come with the promo set and uploaded them to the Internet Archive here so you can listen to it in its entirety. The sample starts at 2:03 into the interview.
