Commentary

Some songs have a life of their own, but other songs are indelibly linked with a certain place and time and hearing them inevitably brings back a flood of memories. For those of us with happy memories of the summer of 1982, however, those memories have proved maddeningly elusive. You see, the song that best represents that time and place has been unavailable since then.

“You know I told you once tonight that you could always speak your mind. You work so hard to say what’s right, I watch you do it all the time. Tell me, am I getting in too deep? Every night I’m talking in my sleep. All the people tell me so, but what do all the people know?” It was a haunting refrain that I heard over and over again in my head for years but couldn’t find a recording of anywhere in real life.

The song was by a band called the Monroes from San Diego, and it was a HUGE hit single in 1982. However, their record company went bankrupt shortly thereafter and the song was lost due to a dispute over who owned the rights. I spent 26 years looking for that song intermittently, a search complicated by the fact that the title is elusive too…some sources have it as, “All the People Tell Me So (But What Do All The People Know?),” while others call it “(All the People Tell Me So But) What Do All The People Know?”

One night last year the search was on again and when I complained to my husband about it he reminded me, “You can find anything on eBay.” It turned out he was right, even a song that’s been lost for more than 20 years. I found an early 90’s CD compilation of early 80’s hits, and ordered two copies of it just to be safe, a move that would turn out to be good when my kids stepped on one of them and destroyed it ten seconds after removing it from the jewel case.

I got another surprise when I read the liner notes, though…the name of one of my good friends from high school was on there as an assistant producer. It’s not the world’s most unusual name, but it does have an unusual spelling, and I was fairly sure it was him. It prompted me to search for him on Facebook, and when I found him there, I also found out he’d spent the 23 years since we’d last seen each other as a producer and composer. My fondest memory of him was searching through record bins in a store in Germany together, me for the Psychedelic Furs, and him for ABBA. He was the one who taught me the correct pronunciation of Agnetha, and I was thrilled to see that he actually got to produce some singles for Frida. We bonded originally over music, so it was only fitting that music reunited us. I’m looking forward to interviewing him for JamsBio soon and hearing his musical adventures since we last met.

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