I remember when I was a kid, it drove me nuts to hear a new song I liked on the radio, then not have the DJ mention its name or who sang it. Usually those guys wouldn’t shut up, breaking into chatter during the song’s outro, most often when I was trying to record a clean copy of the song on my one-deck Panasonic boom box.
I’ve found now, with the search powers of the internet, that it’s easier than ever to track down any song, even one that I only know a vague phrase from. For example, I enjoyed a particular pre-movie tune played at Film Forum one recent evening, so I scrawled down a sentence of the lyric in my Moleskine: “If you’re ever gonna kiss me, it had better be tonight.”
When I got home, I Googled the lyric in double-quotes with the added word lyrics. Once I got the name of the song, I plugged it into the iTunes Music Store and listened to a few of the 30-second samples to find out which version of the song I’d heard; this particular song was a standard and recorded by a number of people. I solved the mystery in a few minutes, whereas in 1986, I’d have had to wait until the weekend for the American Top 40 to have Casey Kasem tell me who was responsible for the marvelous composition I’d heard days earlier, probably “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car” by Billy Ocean. That’s the progress of technology for you.
The song, by the way, was “It Had Better Be Tonight (Meglio Sta Sera),” a Mancini composition originally from the Pink Panther soundtrack, although the version I heard and appreciated was by Buddy Greco, with half the lyrics in English and half in Italian. I like it because it reminds me of They Might Be Giants’ cover of “Istanbul (Not Constantinople),” another gleefully chugging jitterbug of a song.