Inspiration
According to John Butler, the song began as a riff that he had stuck in his head for several years, but had difficulty recalling when he had a guitar. The lyric pattern of "I could be da da, I could be da da" originated from Butler scat singing the riff to his baby daughter, while the opposites in each line of the lyrics led Nicky Bomba to the idea of a zebra asking itself if it was white with black stripes or black with white stripes, from which the song's title is derived.
Read more about this topic: Zebra (song)
Famous quotes containing the word inspiration:
“Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The ironies in the commonplace are my inspiration and delight.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)