I have a crush on Eli Finkel’s and Paul Eastwick’s Love Factually podcast that uses rom-coms and other movies as a framework to discuss the social science and psychology of romantic and other close relationships. It is so good. They started with the ur-example of the genre, When Harry Met Sally. I like that they mix genuine fandom with a pedagogical frame—they are affectionate, humane, and thoughtful about relationship dynamics.
And though they don’t explicitly discuss it, one of this movie’s best-characterized details is the music. In fact, listening to the podcast prompted me to finally do something I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time: make a playlist of the actual music heard in the film, in the order it appears on screen.
It Had to Be You
The commercially-released soundtrack album exclusively features Harry Connick, Jr. It is fantastic, and it turned me onto jazz singers as a whole class of work when I was a baby listener. And today, I imagine most people (myself included) remember the film’s music as “the Harry Connick, Jr. soundtrack.” That’s not wrong. His recordings define the film’s atmosphere. But the movie itself actually has a fuller palette:
- Pop radio from the late 70s (opening road-trip scenes)
- Big-band swing and Songbook recordings (New York exuberance)
- Jazz trio arrangements (emotionally intimate scenes)
- Holiday standards (bookending before/after their split and then climactic reunion)
Even with the handful of 70s pop songs (and an interjection of “La Marseillaise,” courtesy of the Casablanca scene) the whole feels cohesive. It echoes the movie’s seasons—autumn in New York, winter holidays, New Year’s Eve—and Harry and Sally’s relationship arc.
I did my best attempt at recreation. You can listen here: When Harry Met Sally (Full Film Order).
Where or When
It was fun to do. Re-listening to it made obvious how much memory is tied to music. That’s probably the point. A theme of the movie is how couples develop their shared stories—how people remember falling in love. The soundtrack works the same way.
For me, it recalled two memories. 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 gaga for the person I was dating, who had taken me to see the movie over the week between Christmas and New Year’s, before we returned to school for our winter term. Your basic young college romantic memory. I was (and remain) a sentimental fool.
But I have more vivid recall of a different, kind of random scene. It was a few weeks before I’d seen the film with my girlfriend (bear with my non-chronological recall). I was working in a shopping-mall, chain-store record store in northern New Jersey. Columbia Records’ soundtrack album had came out over the summer and was doing a steadily growing business in our store leading up to Christmas. I was standing at the cash register when a customer stormed up, holding the CD, fuming. In a pronounced Jersey accent, he demanded, “Who the fuck is this guy? These are Sinatra’s songs!”
He meant Connick, who deserved way more credit than that. Though I didn’t have a clue (in fact 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 had developed more.
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. I suppose I should give some grace that the dude had missed that Frankie (and every other popular singer of the era) built his career doing exactly what Connick was doing: reinterpreting standards. It’s how the music business was done. The idea of a singer-songwriter as a norm was a much later thing.
But, Jersey Guy actually had a point: as great as the Connick recordings are, the film soundtrack is fuller and better-rounded than the released commercial soundtrack. Hence, this playlist.
Aside: it also was at that mall-store job that I fell in love with Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True. (Attn: several subsequent recipients of mixed tapes.)
