Monday, November 22, 2010

Homonym songs

I remember when my nascent and still tiny MP3 collection, at around a hundred tracks, first had (or at least I first noticed that it had) two songs by the same name. The name was "The Entertainer" with one version by Scott Joplin and one by Billy Joel. These aren't two versions of the same song; covers and remixes don't count. They're distinct songs with the same title.

Now that my entire CD collection has been ripped and I've been buying songs in MP3 format for years, my collection is up to 8102 songs as of this writing, and of course I have a lot of titles repeating in my collection, and even when you remove those which are variations on the same song, there's quite a few left. A lot more than I expected, in fact. As I started going through my song collection, just getting through the songs with titles starting with A, B, and C, I found 29 titles that were used more than once. The same kept happening throughout the rest of the list, so much that I stopped counting.

However, pretty much all of those were titles that are really not surprising to have occur more than once. They're all things that, if you didn't know there wasa song with that name and someone suggested it, you'd say, sure, there has to be a song with that name out there. Sometimes it was mildly surprising that one title only repeated twice ("Life") while another less obvious one repeated four times ("Let It Go"), but very few titles surprised me that they had repeated at all. Quite a few titles had four songs, but none had five.

So I ended up wondering what really unusual ones I might find, where the title wasn't something you'd expect to see repeat. These are my best:
  • Spam, by "Weird" Al Yankovic, and Save Ferris. Not an object you'd expect to inspire a musical paean, let alone two.
  • Utopia, by Goldfrapp, and Alanis Morissette. This would be better if Utopia's song were named "Utopia" instead of "Road To Utopia" of course.
  • Sealion, by Feist, and Jethro Tull. And yet no songs named "Sea Lion."
What are yours?

1 comment:

drscorpio said...

"Best of My Love"
The Eagles have a ballad by that name. It was also a big disco hit of my junior high era by The Emotions.