Orange Colored Sky (Outtake) — Nat King Cole Lyrics

Song Facts:

• Genre: Jazz/Pop


• Lyricist: Milton DeLugg and Willie Stein


• Arranged By: Nelson Riddle


• Composers: Milton DeLugg and Willie Stein


• Featured in Soundtracks: Fallout 4 and Fallout 76

Annotations and Meaning:

The lyrics of the song "Orange Colored Sky," by Nat King Cole, introduce an ordinary day but with dramatic change out of a sudden, unexpected event metaphorically referred to as an encounter with love. The song opens in a still scene under an "orange-colored sky," whether interpreted as the sun rising or setting. The environmental detail can bring about a sudden change, which helps add to the theme of the song in that light, at either time of day, could change the ordinary into something extraordinary.

Being included in the soundtracks for the video games Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 sets the song in an apocalyptic view. In that case, the "orange colored sky" can be taken symbolically as an allusion to the nuclear fallout-stained skies, thus indicative of a world being dramatically changed at one second in time, just as the protagonist's life has been changed from the power of love. The two-layered imagery of beauty and devastation, therefore, echoes the similarly melodramatic effect of a romantic encounter in the song.

The onomatopoeia— "Flash, Bam, Alakazam" —is also used to heighten the theme of sudden, magical transformation. These sounds go a long way in vividly illustrating the startling, almost magically conjured moment of falling in love—it's just about equivalent to a comic book, where in literally a nanosecond, the ordinary flips into the fantastic.

"Drinkin' in sunshine" might be drinking in the sun or drinking something intoxicating. It symbolizes two views, extending to the position of a drunkard who sees the world through an "orange haze," giving a manifested way of being in love — where emotions blur into reality. The overwhelming forceful imagery with "yell timber" brings into realization a world-shattering moment that probably captures the overpowering nature of love. These metaphors might also allude to the feelings of someone intoxicated, where the world seems to spin and disintegrate around them.

Conclusion:

"Orange Colored Sky" is a love song: a free event, one which comes unexpectedly into our lives and changes us forever in a whirl of vivid metaphor, comic book exclamation, and double entendres, which play with how the listener is to perceive reality.