People often talk to me about music, so I’m not surprised when friends ask me about specific songs. But I found it uncanny—and actually unsettling—when two elderly individuals very close to me, both in poor health and near death, mentioned the same obscure song.
These two individuals never met each other, and lived thousands of miles apart, but in their final days they both wanted to talk about the same record from more than fifty years ago. They told me that the lyrics of this pop tune captured their melancholy reflections on what had gone wrong in their lives.
The song in question, “Is That All There Is?,” had been a modest hit for vocalist Peggy Lee in 1969, but never quite reached the top ten. I’m hardly surprised by that. It was the era of Woodstock and psychedelic rock, and a gloomy song of this sort had nothing in common with the upbeat youth movement that was defining the musical culture of the day.
The track is mostly a semi-spoken monologue, interrupted by sung interludes on the meaninglessness of life—capped by a complaint that “I’m not ready for that final disappointment.” I consider it the mirror image of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” a more successful hit of the same era, which celebrates a triumphant life full of victories and self-actualization.
If you never got the chance to do things your way, this is your song.
by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker | Read more:
Video: Peggy Lee/YouTube
[ed. Definitely worth a full read. See also, this official video of Peggy Lee's "Fever" (yow).]
