Reuniting with Lost Loves at the Jewel and in the CD Section

Not long after I started working at the library, I was reunited with a lost love at the Jewel, in the bread and cereal aisle to be precise. The lost love was not a person but a song, and when I heard the opening keyboard line it was as if some missing puzzle piece of my heart had snapped perfectly into place, and all felt right in my world.

The song was Dancing in the Moonlight by King Harvest, and if you listened to rock radio in the 70s you probably heard it, even if you've long forgotten the title. To my pre-teen ears, this song was happiness itself bottled in a perfect little three minute song. I especially loved the keyboard part, a bit of contrapuntal wizardry that sounds like something Bach might have written if Bach had lived in the 1970s and taken to an electric keyboard on a night when he was feeling especially loose.

When I was growing up, my older sister had the song on a 45 rpm, probably purchased at the local drugstore back when drugstores sold 45s. Although I had been explicitly forbidden to touch her albums and 45s, I'd sneak a listen to Dancing in the Moonlight when she was out of the house. (I also touched her Beatles white album, multiple times. I have no regrets.) Though I absolutely adored this song, I somehow lost track of it.

Thankfully, after hearing it that day in the Jewel, I tracked it down on a CD at the library. The song has found its way onto a number of compilations over the years, including Have a Nice Decade: The '70s Pop Culture Box, as well as the soundtrack to Outside Providence, both of which the library owns.

Did you know you can search the online catalog for songs? A lot of patrons are surprised when they learn this; they think you can only search by CD title, not song title. Here are are a few tips and tricks for searching for songs in the online catalog:

Use the default words or phrase search.

Type the words "and" and "cd" along with the song title, so your search string looks like this:

dancing in the moonlight and cd

But let's say you know that the band Toploader also recorded Dancing in the Moonlight, but you only want the King Harvest recording. You can add the name of the band, King Harvest, to your search string so that your results only contain the King Harvest original. Your search string would then look like this:

dancing in the moonlight and cd and king harvest

As a general rule, if you know the name of the performer or performers of a song, type it in and it'll speed your search. This is especially true if you're searching for a song that has lots of common words. For example, say you're looking for the song Baby, I Love You. If you type in Baby, I Love You and CD, 377 titles will come up. If you know that the fabulous Ronettes recorded that song, and you type in Baby, I Love You and CD and Ronettes, the catalog will bring up only the CD that contains that song performed by the Ronettes--The Best of the Ronettes. A great CD by the way!

Other songs I've been happily reunited with:

Fool's Gold by Graham Parker on Graham Parker: The Ultimate Collection. One of rock's all-time great angry young men allows a glimpse of the idealist and romantic behind the dark glasses--without sounding mushy. Most of the other songs on this collection are great, too.

Dixie Storms by Maria McKee on Maria McKee: The Ultimate Collection. A haunting song of beauty and longing sung by the unparalleled McKee. That she isn't well-known given her extraordinary voice, emotional range and brilliant songs is one of the world's great mysteries. (And how can I not love a songwriter who wrote several songs inspired by the work of Tennessee Williams?)

Maria McKee

Happy searching and listening, and feel free to share your own stories of reunion with songs from your past.

What's Elvis Costello Doing in the Ballet Section?

There's an Elvis Costello CD in the Ballet section (Il Sogno)
There's a Sting CD in the Lute section
(Songs from the Labyrinth)
There's a Yo-Yo Ma CD in the Jazz section (Hush)

What's the world coming to?!
Have the shelvers gone mad?!
Have the catalogers gone mad?!

Absolutely not! But more and more musicians, composers and songwriters are thinking--and writing and performing--outside of the box they're associated with. So you might not find every CD featuring your favorite artist in the same section.

For example, though you'll find most of Elvis Costello's CDs in the rock section, they aren't all there. To find one of them you'll have to stroll over to the Ballet section. That's right, the Ballet section! Although truth be told, longtime Costello fans shouldn't be surprised. The man has long been a chameleon. He has written songs with "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" songwriter Burt Bacharach for the CD Painted from Memory (it's in the Popular section); he has collaborated with the Brodsky Quartet, and a couple of those songs can be heard on Best of Brodsky Quartet: Featuring Björk & Elvis Costello; and in 2000, when an Italian dance troupe contacted him about composing music for an adaption of A Midsummer Night's Dream, he took them up on the offer. The result is Il Sogno, and in the liner notes he talks about writing different types of music to accompany different kinds of characters. (Of supernatural beings, he wrote: "I thought it only appropriate that they should be swinging fairies.") While some classical compositions by rockers have been savaged by critics, The New York Times called it "a rhapsodic piece full of shifting moods, with moments of eerie delicacy and of comic pomp."

Others who have experimented with non-rock musical forms are Paul McCartney, who co-wrote Liverpool Oratorio with Carl Davis; and Billy Joel, who wrote Fantasies & Delusions: Music for Solo Piano.

If you're ever unsure of where to find a CD, please don't hesitate to ask at the Readers' Services desk on the 3rd floor. We're more than happy to help.

Have you ever checked out any of these CDs, or any other genre-busting CDs? (I've been warned against Liverpool Oratorio.) Do you enjoy Elton John's forays into musicals and movie soundtracks?