It was kind of cool, stumbling across this piece about Same Old Lang Syne. I wonder how many people have stories about how they discovered that particular song?
For me, I found it via an ex, around ‘92. It was winter, and our years-long relationship was almost over; it would have died naturally by the New Year, but as luck would have it, diamond jewelry has a way of dragging things out, and we survived until February.
But we still seemed a tenable couple in mid-November, when she asked me if I could remember that Christmas song about the old lover in the grocery store. She couldn’t remember the title (other than that there was “something weird about it”) or the name of the artist, but she knew it felt like the perfect song for the bleak holidays. (That, I realized later, was foreshadowing.) We wracked our brains, but couldn’t remember anything.
A few weeks later, I was unloading a shipment at work when I heard the truck driver warbling along to himself: “Met my old lover in the grocery store, the snow was fallin’ Christmas Eve…” I immediately dropped the box and asked him what the hell he was singing.
“Fogelberg, I think,” he said. “Same Old Lang Syne.”
I headed to Tower Records that night and dug around for a Greatest Hits CD. I knew the big songs in Fogelberg’s catalog (Longer, Leader Of The Band, Run For The Roses), but I had no clue about this weird Christmas song that everyone but me seemed to half-remember. As I listened to it at home, I found myself wondering how you could forget it once you’d heard it.
I mean, yeah, it’s wussy, soft piano-rock from the Land of Long, Long Ago, and Fogelberg made a career out of beating people to death with lush, sweeping sentiment… but that song?
It’s a perfect portrait of a moment, so vivid that I can smell the frigid night air and feel the snow crunching underfoot. More importantly, it was the first song about adult emotions and behavior that resonated with me as deeply as all the songs about fucking and rebellion always had.
We drank a toast to innocence
We drank a toast to now
We tried to reach beyond the emptiness
But neither one knew how
That’s my idea of Christmas. Happy holidays, fuckers.