The 1960s was a good decade for squares, and there’s any number of box-shaped pop songs I’d have loved to see on our list: “Downtown”, “Blue Moon”, “Danke Schoen”. The killer among them, though, is this foghorn rendering of “Moon River”, the best song ever kind of made up by Truman Capote. His Breakfast at Tiffany’s put Holly Golightly out on the fire escape singing “harsh-tender wandering tunes with words that smacked of pineywoods or prairie”— in other words, country songs. Mancini and Mercer’s film theme does the same thing to the country song that the film does to the book, lavishing it with strings and glamour and insisting on its heterosexuality. But that high-lonesome harmonica drives home what’s underneath.
This is a song about dreaming of escaping to someplace beautiful and better, someplace “waiting ‘round the bend” where you’ll finally be content— one of a few reasons I used to love Morrissey’s version, back when I was in high school and itching to leave town. But the burr in the song’s heart is that that place never magically arrives; it never ever will. And once you realize that, this tune changes: It stops being a Hollywood dream and turns back to the incredibly sad, wounded, lopsided lament Holly sang in print. It’s a song of yearning for impossible dreams, and that damned harmonica seems to know it.
Nitsuh on Andy Williams’ version of this.
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