I have a hot crush on the Love Factually podcast by Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick. It’s a two-man show that uses rom-com movies as a framework to discuss the social science and psychology of romantic and other close relationships.
It’s terrific. I like that the hosts mix genuine critical appreciation with a pedagogical frame. They are affectionate, humane, and thoughtful about relationship dynamics.
The podcast launched with the ur-example of the genre, When Harry Met Sally. Though the hosts don’t explicitly discuss it, one of this movie’s best-characterized details is its music. In fact, listening to the podcast prompted me to do something I’d been intending for a long time: make a playlist of the actual music heard in the movie, in the order it appears in the story.
It Had to Be You
I did my best to recreate the film’s exuberant on-screen musical arc, and you can listen here: When I Met Harry and Sally (Full Film Order).
A couple of songs from the film are unavailable on Apple Music. Each might be best described as a brief musical cameo.
The first is heard second-hand in the indelible scene at the end of Casablanca. Harry and Sally are in their individual beds talking on the phone, watching Humphrey Bogart say to Claude Rains, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” before “La Marseillaise” plays in the background of the film’s end credits. I substituted a straight-ahead recording of the French national anthem that somehow works almost perfectly as a break between Acts I and II in my cinematic playlist.
The second missing song is from a brief moment when Harry and Sally perform a goofy karaoke-style version of “Surrey with a Fringe on Top.” That’s not something that was ever going to be released as a single, so I added a fantastically moody recording of Wes Montgomery performing at the Blue Note club in New York. Tonally, it’s a faithful fit for the songs that surround it.
The final missing song is something you easily could overlook because it’s almost subconscious, ambient place-setting to the intensely foregrounded dialog in the movie’s climactic New Year’s Eve scene. It’s Louis Armstrong performing “Auld Lang Syne.” While there is a live 1954 recording he made for CBS Radio in San Francisco that’s a just-perfect fit, it unfortunately is not available to stream. I decided to leave that song out for now rather than substitute an imitation.
I Could Write a Book
Columbia Records’ commercially-released soundtrack album exclusively features Harry Connick, Jr. It is fantastic, and it turned me onto jazz singers as a whole class of performance when I was a baby listener. Today, I imagine most people (myself included) remember the film’s music as “the Harry Connick, Jr. soundtrack.” That’s not wrong. His songs are prominent in the film’s atmosphere.
But the movie has a fuller musical palette that mirrors Harry and Sally’s story arc:
- FM radio from the late 70s (opening road-trip scenes)
- Big-band swing and Songbook recordings (exuberant and joyful New York friendship)
- Jazz trio arrangements (emotional intimacy and connection)
- Holiday standards (bookending their split and reunion)
Even with the handful of 70s pop songs (and the interjection of “La Marseillaise”) the whole has great flow The soundtrack echoes the movie’s seasons—autumn in New York, winter holidays, New Year’s Eve—and how Harry and Sally’s relationship develops.
Where or When
Putting together the playlist was fun to do. Listening to the movie’s songs again made it obvious how tightly bound music is to emotional memory. That’s probably the point. A theme of the movie is the way couples develop their shared stories, how people remember falling in love. That’s exactly how the soundtrack works.
For me, it recalled two particular moments. The first is seeing the movie for the first time at a theater in 1989. I was a 19-year-old on winter break during college. I was enthusiastically head-over-heels for the person I was dating. She’d taken me to see the movie over the week between Christmas and New Year’s, before we returned to school for our winter term. It’s a nice but very ordinary young-college romantic memory. I was (and remain) a sentimental fool.
I have more vivid recall of a different moment. It was a few weeks before I’d seen the film with my girlfriend, so I knew nothing about the movie.
I was working in a chain record store in a shopping mall in northern New Jersey over my six-week holiday break. The soundtrack album had come out earlier in the year and was doing a decent amount of business in our store leading up to Christmas.
I was standing at the cash register when a customer stormed up, holding the CD, furious. In a textbook Jersey accent, he demanded, “Who the fuck is this guy? These are Sinatra’s songs!”
He meant Connick. Though I didn’t have a clue (I was feeling serious “Sir, this is a Wendy’s” vibes), the complaint made sense later when my appreciation of the Songbook era of pop music history developed.
I realized Jersey Guy wasn’t entirely wrong. For a lot of Sinatra fans—especially there and then—those standards weren’t just members of the American songbook. They were Frank Sinatra songs, period.
But Connick deserved more credit than that. Sinatra and his contemporaries built their careers doing exactly what Connick was doing: reinterpreting standards. It’s how the music business worked when Tin Pan Alley still reigned. The idea of a singer-songwriter as the norm came much later.
Still, as great as the Connick recordings are, the music as actually played in the movie is fuller and more varied than the commercial soundtrack album. Hence, this playlist.
