Skittle Road

Original song “Skittle Road” is an instrumental piece whose title came from a small misunderstanding on my part. As a Beatles fan, I had read about their early connection to skiffle*, and at the time I somehow confused *skiffle with Skittle — which, of course, is not a musical style at all, but a candy. Since the tune also had a bit of a road-trip feeling to it, I ended up calling it “Skittle Road.” Then the title became even more fitting when I discovered the strange real-life story of a truck in Wisconsin that spilled hundreds of thousands of red Skittles across a rural road, turning the pavement bright red. That image stayed with me and made me think of a kind of candy version of the Yellow Brick Road — a road trip slipping for a moment out of the ordinary and into the wonderfully absurd. So the piece became, in my mind, a musical road trip: part open-road adventure, part playful misunderstanding, and part sweet little detour into fantasy.