A Long Strange Search For A Song

For the past two days the melody of an old song had been playing in my head.  It’s not even a song I particularly like that much but I could not stop hearing it.  I don’t know if this happens to everyone but it happens to me from time to time.

It became a problem for me because I could not remember the name of the song or the artist.  I was pretty sure it was from the 60s and I thought it was part of a movie soundtrack but I was not even positive about these aspects of the matter.  It is one of those instrumental songs that became “elevator music” and I remember hearing it many times—like when I listened to the Muzak in a doctor’s office.  But again, I did not know the song title or the artist.

(Some of the young people reading this will have no idea what “Muzak” is, and it’s probably better that way.)

Part of me thought, “Forget about this song.  Who cares what the title is?  Who cares who recorded it?”

But it kept playing on the little turntable in my head.

So, I began searching on YouTube putting in all kinds of desperate search criteria such as: “easy listening + 60s,” or “movie soundtracks + 60s,” or “instrumental hits + 60s,” and many others. I knew I would recognize the song if I heard it but I listed to dozens of old tunes and could not find it.

I thought, “Do I know someone who would recognize an old instrumental piece from the 60s if I did a bad job of humming it?”  I couldn’t think of anyone.  (Plus I thought, “This would definitely qualify as wasting a person’s time over an incredibly petty matter.”)

But the song continued to play in my head although now it was accompanied by some other old 60s instrumental tunes after all the searching on YouTube.  (There is a Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass song playing in my head as I type these words.)

Today, I went to an internet site called “Midomi.”  Midomi provides a tune recognition program that allows the user to hum a melody and then search for the song based on the tune that has been hummed.  I hummed the song several times and the search results came back with old Italian songs and, a few times, it identified a Lady Gaga song that apparently has some melodic similarity to the song for which I was searching.

My frustration continued.

Finally though, I held my guitar up to the microphone on my computer and played the melody of the song rather than humming it.  Sure enough, one of the search results came back with these words: “The Midnight Cowboy Theme.”

A big smile came to my face!  “I’m pretty sure that’s it,” I thought.

I typed that title into the search field on YouTube and the song began to play.  Yep, that was the song that has been pestering me for two days.  I found it!

Now that I found the song and listened to it, however, I have confirmed that, “It’s an okay song, but I am really not that thrilled about it.” 

It sure involved a lot of effort to figure that out, huh?

                             Click here to listen to the song!