* And don't you think that Sony is thrilled to finally win a format war, all these years after losing the VHS - Betamax battle? Sadly, Sony wins right at the moment when consumers are pulling back from buying a lot of discretionary purchases (AKA, 'stuff'), including DVDs and other entertainment. Rather than buying a lot of discs that take up space and need to be stored at home (we have a whole trunk sitting in our living room full of old DVDs gathering dust; it never gets opened except in extreme circumstances), many people would rather rent a movie online, either through Netflix or iTunes, or simply catch whatever free content exists on websites like Hulu.com or YouTube.
Ah, but I digress. During the ad for Rachel Getting Married, they played a cover of a song I used to know fairly well. The song had been slowed way down, and I couldn't pick out the melody, but I recognized the lyrics as being familiar. The question then arises: how do I find a song that I barely remember, when I can't even remember all the lyrics?
I should note that the only words I could remember from the ad by the time I returned home were the keywords "faster roller coaster." I couldn't search with those three words in quotes, because they were not an exact phrase from the song. I was a little stuck, thanks to my lousy memory!
The first step was to find a song lyrics search website that is worth something. Since I don't search for song lyrics very often, I don't have a good source site bookmarked the way I have IMDB for movie searches. When I googled for "lyrics search website," it returned 77,500,000 hits. The first one (and it doesn't appear to be a paid ad, although it sits at the very top of the search results, a spot usually reserved for paid ads on Google) promised to search for lyrics by keyword. However, it's a terrible website, and not recommended. In fact, most of the sites found on the first page of the Google results didn't search for individual song lyrics as much as they searched for song titles (one notable result that kept getting returned: "Roller Coaster" by the Partridge Family -- that's not it!) and/or band names. Songs and bands were not what I was searching for.
Fortunately, about halfway down the list of hits was the Yahoo! Music lyrics search website. On Yahoo! Music, the first few hits for my keyword search were the songs "Roller Coaster" by Blood, Sweat & Tears (say, did the Partridges just cover the B,S&T song?) and "Get Off" by Republica. I clearly knew that the song I was thinking of was neither of those two hits.
However, the next few hits were for a song called "Everyday." The first version offered up by Yahoo! was done by James Taylor, and I knew that wasn't right, either. But the very next version was performed by Buddy Holly and the Crickets. A-HA!!! That's it!!! That is the song I knew I remembered from hearing the song lyrics being used in the movie ad. I'm including an MP3 link for the song at the top right of this blog; you should be able to hear the song simply by clicking on the play button. I'm also including the html for an MP3 of the song here:
Everyday - Buddy Holly
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