“Die Hard” is to Christmas movies, what this song is to Christmas music.
Listeners will no doubt forever debate whether it is, or is not, a Christmas song. One thing is clear: It definitely creeps into playlists this time of year. Over the past few months, I been learning it on guitar (because that’s my jam) with the goal of this version, this holiday season.
One thing beyond debate: “Same Old Lang Syne” is a remarkable bit of music, from my all-time favorite writer.
When you account for the way it melds together a wistful story and music (especially in the final verse and ending solo) it well be considered Dan’s best song. It’s a story-song that moves us steadily through time, ala “Cats in the Cradle.”
But unlike so many pop songs (even Chapin’s) please note how it does *not* “resolve” with a repeated final chorus at the end…but instead pushes us off in a whole new, surprising, direction…with that melancholy, yet beautiful, last coda about snow and rain…
It’s a song about “innocence lost,” and perhaps felt again, if “for just a moment.
Which was, of course, the overall theme of that incredible album.
Writer Sam Anderson wrote a great NYT piece on the song and his family’s reaction to it the first time he/they ever heard it. His piece talks about their initial reaction, as it begins with smaltzy production and a perhaps corny first line.
But by the end, as happens to the best of us, the entire family gets caught up:
“Nothing earthshaking happens, because the song is an ode not to fantasy or salvation but to the actual complex grain of adult life: melancholy, emptiness, chance, failure, embarrassment, and — somehow, in spite of it all — meaningful human connection. Eventually the beer runs out, the ex-lovers part and the jazz giant Michael Brecker launches into a ripping sax solo on the melody of “Auld Lang Syne.” My family sat in the car in awed silence.”
Many of us have had these kinds of encounters with old lovers. I certainly have. We were even sitting in a car, and it was even raining at the time. That’s what makes a great song, great; this kind of “call back” to an all-too-human shared experience.
And so, if I may analyze a bit, the schmaltzy production, the potentially-groaner lyrics….these fade over time. Once the song burrows its way into you…all that shifts, and all you get is “the feels.” Years later as we hear this song again and again, all those memories of our own lives, all the memories we have of the song and when we first hear it, flood back.
And that is one of the greatest superpowers of music.
Like just about every single Bob Seeger hit, this song was wistfully nostalgic the first time you ever heard it. And the passage of time only deepens this for us all. The song itself, especially now that Dan is gone, becomes its own wistful, more innocent, memory.
As it turns out, the lyrics were inspired by an actual encounter Dan once had. And to this day in Peoria, Dan-fans make pilgrimage to the site. (I certainly did, on my Fogelberg trip there…) The DMN’s own Michael Granberry tells the song’s backstory.
And Michael Granberry’s final thoughts on the song are also how I’ll end, because I really can’t say it better than this:
“I’m not alone in saying how much I love “Same Old Lang Syne.” Sure, it’s corny and schmaltzy, and yet, it touches a deep nerve. It embodies the spirit of the holidays, of time and place and the past, as well as any song I know. It also serves as a tribute to the wonders of the saxophone, which plays a key element in punctuating the lyrics with its own je ne sais quoi.
As Anderson wrote in his piece, Fogelberg’s song “is simultaneously hilarious, sad, beautiful, corny and transcendent.”
And, sure, he writes, it is “a bit of a groaner,” but “this, it turns out, is one of the big jobs of adulthood: to find wonder in the groaning.”
I love the song for how it demonstrates the magic of creativity, which springs so often from life’s most ordinary moments. In the end, the song fills us with gratitude, for Fogelberg having written it and for the fact that he went out for whipping cream at the same time Greulich went out for eggnog.
From now on, our cars will be collectively parked on Fogelberg Parkway, as they should be.”
—Michael Granberry