Good for a giggle, here's one writer's heartfelt Edvard Munch 'scream' about songs that take up residence in your head and stick around like the man who came to dinner (we'll overlook the cheese remark):
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Duo's cheese or Gordo's dirge: I'm sunk
By Leslie Gray Streeter, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 8, 2003
I have an unusually high tolerance for cheese, but there are two songs that share an equally sinister power to burrow their evil way into my brain and grow like Satanic ear Jiffy Pop until they explode: England Dan and John Ford Coley's insipid love classic I'd Really Love To See You Tonight and Gordon Lightfoot's three-year-long The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which gets my vote for most depressing radio hit ever.
I'd Really Love To See You Tonight is just so sing-along-able, despite the fact that no one even knows what the stupid words are! A poll of four fellow staffers proved that three of them had been singing "I'm not talkin' 'bout millennium," while the fourth had no clue what the words were and just made up some sound that fit. (For the record, it's "I'm not talkin' 'bout movin' in." Now you can incessantly sing it correctly.)
It's so insipidly earnest, yet you know England Dan and John Ford Coley are full of it. I mean, how can you trust men who won't even put the "g" on the end of their words? But by the time you've convinced yourself you don't really care if there's a warm wind blowin' the stars around, you're hooked. It's tragic, I tell you.
Speaking of tragic, there's no way a song about a true-life fatal shipwreck should be catchy, but Gordon Lightfoot's oddly monotone coo lulls me into the tale of the Edmund Fitzgerald every time. It's like a musical version of those In Search Of... shows with Leonard Nimoy, where some brave group of men sets out on the sea, never to be heard from again. And they made a pop song out of it! I get the shivers every time I hear it, especially when Lightfoot sings "When the gales of November come ear-LEEE!" Auggh! I want to run and yet I... can't... turn... it... off!
leslie_streeter@pbpost.com