“The Mastodon Conversation” concerns climate change and environmental stewardship, and it takes the form of a discussion between me and an animal that went extinct about 14,000 years ago. Here’s a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4iqeF3Jw2I
Two enormous skeletons of Mastodons greet you at the entrance to the Natural History Museum in Ann Arbor. I’m a fan. I got a nice selfie on a recent visit.
I wrote the song in the spirit of the wonderful British duo of the 1950s-1960s, Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, particularly their collection of songs called The Bestiary. The best known is “The Hippopotamus” with its stirring chorus, “Mud, mud, glorious mud”, and they also wrote about such beasts as the gnu, the rhino, the warthog, the armadillo and the sloth.
