Mystery solved, and Burt Lancaster
About a year ago, I went grocery shopping without my iPod. (The whole dead battery thing, now resolved with a very cool, flashy new battery that lasts forever.) This is always a dangerous thing, and can lead to terrible earworms. It can also be surprising what kinds of songs get into programmed grocery store music these days, and it’s not all bad, though there’s something infinitely less cool about bopping along to Blondie coming from the store’s speakers than bopping along to Blondie on your iPod. It’s just the way it is. (Not that being a 44-year-old man bopping along to anything in a grocery store is cool.)
Point? I’m getting to it. Point is that I was in the bread aisle and the song that was playing suddenly grabbed hold of me. It was a kind of lilting, sweet-voiced thing, somewhere in the neighborhood of SixpenceNoneTheRicher, and I realized that I had heard this song many, many times, that I really, really liked it, and that I had no, no idea who did it. In addition, I could remember just about none of the lyric, just that it had “year” in it, something like “time of the year” or “memorable year.” So I started scouring the lyrics sites with these hopeless fragments, and of course found nothing. Then I scoured the sites of the bands that I thought sounded like this, including Sixpence, but came up empty. I searched through Top 100 lists from the past few years, thinking it was a kinda mid-90s sound, but didn’t find anything likely. And I would do this from time to time, but never quite found what I was looking for. I even hit on a site called Sirens of Song, which was dedicated to women who sang in just about the right register for what I was looking for. (Turns out I should have scoured that site a little harder.) But I knew I’d hear it again someday and get more of the lyric.
Yesterday, we were at a benefit cookout for our ballet school at a local country club, and as they were doing the raffles, I heard this amazing song come over the muzak, ever so quietly. I actually got up and went out into the hallway, hoping to catch a snippet, but there were no speakers out there, so I dashed around to the foyer and positioned myself directly under the only speaker out there, cupping my ear so I could hear. I got a couple of lines but knew I was going to forget them if I didn’t write them down — but I had no pen, pencil or paper. Technology to the rescue: I went to the coat room and grabbed my phone, figured out how to enter a “voice note” without forgetting what I had to say.
As soon as we got home, I raced to the lyrics sites and found out what I had almost found out once before from the Sirens of Song site: it was The Sundays, featuring Harriet Wheeler, singing “Here’s Where the Story Ends.” (Older than I expected, too: 1989. Where was I?)
Now, was that so hard? Very thankful there’s an iTunes store in the world.
Burt Lancaster has nothing to do with Harriet Wheeler, except that we all sat down to watch “Field of Dreams” together on Saturday night. I don’t think I’ve seen it since it came out, but we saw a fragment of it a few weeks ago and we’re all suckers for a good baseball movie, and memory had failed to remind me that in fact this is a great baseball movie. But what really surprised me was the final movie role of Burt Lancaster, who always had an incredible screen presence, a fascinating combination of strength and grace, a certain ease of gesture that I never saw in another Hollywood star. Turns out he was a former acrobat who worked to keep his physique throughout his career, something that shows in subtle ways in his movies. But in this one, he plays the doctor who gave up baseball after a bad debut, gets a second chance, and gives it up again to save a child. And as much as I know this is just a silly fantasy of a movie, when he steps off that field and transforms back into the doctor, and you know he can’t go back again — Niagara Falls, Frankie. I weep like a baby.