"The birds and the bees" - Inara George of the Bird and the Bee

Intro

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• single
• straightforward
• wholesome
• out of context

• the birds and the bees
• the facts of life
• euphemism
• a ton

• antiseptic
• opening act

2. Read and Prepare - Read the introduction and prepare to hear the audio.

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“Well, you see, son, when a man and woman get along really well and spend a lot of time together, sometimes they decide to…uh…form an electronic jazz duo together.”

No, wait. That’s not how that common parent to child speech goes. Parents have to tell their kids about the birds and the bees, not the Bird and the Bee, even though that would be an easier conversation to have.

At some point, all kids ask their parents, “Where do babies come from?” The idiom “the birds and the bees” refers to the answer to that question. Since the facts of life are a pretty private subject, it helps to have a euphemism for sex and reproduction.

So, since your parents weren’t available for an Ebaby! lesson, we asked Inara George, one half of Los Angeles jazz/pop duo the Bird and the Bee, to have this important conversation with you. Jason recently talked to her on the phone about her hit song “Love Letter to Japan” and where babies…or, uh, her band’s name comes from.

Dialog

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2. Study - Read the dialog again to see how the vocab words are used.

Inara

Jason

Inara:  Hi Jason, it’s Inara.

Jason:  Cool. You guys just played with Katy Perry in Hollywood. How was that?

Inara:  It was fun. We haven’t been playing a ton lately, so it’s always fun to play a show.

Jason:  How did you find her fans?

Inara:  They were very sweet. We haven’t opened up for anyone in a long time, but it seemed like the audience was into it, so that was cool.

Jason:  Well, tell me about “Love Letter to Japan.” What inspired that song?

Inara:  Our first record did really well in Japan and we went there I think three times in a year, so we thought it would be nice to do sort of a love song to Japan. But the label chose that song as the single and we didn’t even think that song was going to make it on the record.

Jason:  But then it seems like a really fantastical song. Like, it has a dream in it…

Inara:  It’s a pretty straightforward song. You know like when someone learns a new language and when they start to dream in that language, that’s what people say, is when they’ve actually learned it, you know?

Jason:  Right, right. So your name is the Bird and the Bee and you have this sort of futuristic electronic sound, but it’s also kind of comfortable and classic. And “the birds and the bees” is such a classic, wholesome idiom, I was hoping you could just explain what that means.

Inara:  Well, for us it came from a song. I wrote the lyrics to this song called “Birds and the Bees” and I sort take the idiom out of context so it doesn’t really mean what it means. I think in terms of what it actually means, I think it came from a poem, and I think in reference to sex. And it turned into maybe more of an antiseptic way of discussing sex with young people.

Jason:  So it wasn’t that song, “Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it…”

Inara:  No, that wasn’t the first time.

 

Grammar Point

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Lesson MP3

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