Re-Acquiring Old CDs: Elton John's "Something About The Way You Look Tonight"/"Candle In The Wind 1997"

 About ten years ago, I got into a pretty gnarly car accident. In attempting to drive from Texas to Colorado to attend a funeral, on a dark stretch of road with no lights to illuminate the way, a large deer with a huge antler rack wandered into the road, with his butt in the shoulder and his head in my lane. Driving 70 miles an hour, there was no chance of slowing down or avoiding the deer in time. With the deer's head just barely enough in my lane, his head smacked into my windshield, shattering the glass, waking my friend in the passenger seat. And immediately afterward, I lost control of the car, skidding across the road, and finally rolling the car entirely. The car rolled at least two times, maybe three. Thankfully, no other cars were on the road, and the area was so rural that there wasn't anything left to hit or land in, and the car amazingly landed upright on its wheels, albeit now completely demolished with all of the windows completely blown out. My belongings were scattered and strewn about, not just in the car, but out on the road and in the grassy center median between the north and southbound lanes. The emergency response team that came to our rescue found my personal bag (a satchel bag about the size of a purse that carried my wallet and other important items) somewhere in the debris trail the car had left behind. Shockingly, my friend and I were mostly able to just walk away from the accident. He had a little scratch on his head that just needed some light bandaging, and I only had bruised knees simply because they had banged together during the rollover.

But more than losing the car I had been driving for nearly the last ten years, I was far more sad about something else I had lost in that accident: pretty much every single CD I had ever owned.

I had kept all of my CDs in a large, oversized CD wallet for long car rides, and this trip to Colorado definitely counted as a long car ride. But those discs simply did not make it out of the wreck. Even the wallet itself had been a relic of my past, having been scribbled all over in high school with multi-colored gel pens. All of the music I had collected from childhood through high school and into young adulthood, all of it was now gone in a flash thanks to one damned deer wandering aimlessly into the dark highway. All of my rock, my '90s club music, my video game soundtracks, my Eurobeat--all of it was now gone.

For many years, I couldn't bring myself to buy any music again. In my mind, it was just such an expensive endeavor. I had spent so much money on it over the course of about 20 years, and even imagining buying physical albums again, either replacing old music or even buying something new, made me tremendously sad. I hated the idea of spending that much money again, with the possibility that it could all just disappear at any moment. But as time went on, I found myself face-to-face with a different kind of problem. Digital distribution simply was not the hero that people have made it out to be over the last ten to fifteen years. If I had been worried that my CDs could all just go up in flames at any time, it was even more possible that a digital streaming service could take your digital copies away from you without a moment's notice. There have been a couple of times when a digital game or movie I have previously purchased has been taken away from me when the service providing the license disappeared or the company providing the license decided that the license could be revoked. I realized I did not want to be in a position where that could be done to my music, too. And truth be told, I missed the tactile feeling of being able to hold my albums, to place a disc in a drive, to flip through the included booklets and read the lyrics, see the additional provided artwork, interviews, and credits that you will never find when you look the song up on Spotify (if you can even find it there, or anywhere else).

That's what has led me to start purchasing all of my old music all over again. I've formed Amazon wish lists and offline notepad lists for anything I couldn't find on Amazon in an attempt to regain what was once lost. It's been difficult to accomplish because I don't always remember every single CD I ever owned. Sometimes I have a vague memory of something I once heard, and I can't always remember what the song was or who performed it, but I'm sure I owned it at some point. So every once in a while I have to come back to my lists and add something that I've suddenly remembered I once had. It's also been difficult because I know I had some promotional discs that definitely came bundled together with magazines or video games or any number of other methods of distribution, and I don't know that I will ever find those discs ever again. But I'm on a mission to try and find them anyway.

I thought that it might not be a terrible idea to write about the CDs that I've been slowly getting back for myself. I've had to buy a brand new CD tower to hold everything I've been re-acquiring, and staring at each of the albums makes me remember who I was and where I was when I first got them, along with unique memories tied to them at various moments in time. So this journal entry is just the first of hopefully many to come, and serves as the set-up to more detailed descriptions of many other future entries. In entries to come later, I won't have to give you the whole set-up for why it is I'm buying all these CDs again. I can just refer back to this specific entry for those of you who will come by later.

And so, I decided to start with a CD that's short, with very little to talk about, to ease myself into this process.

Elton John: "Something About The Way You Look Tonight"/"Candle In The Wind 1997"

Album artwork for Elton John's "Something About The Way You Look Tonight"/"Candle In The Wind 1997"

I cannot say that I have ever been the biggest Elton John fan. Of course, to not respect his historical place in music history would be rather foolish. But even as a kid in the 1990s, Elton John was a musician of my parents' generation that I did not much identify with. That having been said, after the sudden death of Princess Diana, John's newly updated rendition of "Candle In The Wind", described on the cover of this single as being "In loving memory of Diana, Princess of Wales", the single played constantly. Even as an American, it was pretty inescapable. For quite some time after the song's release, it hit the radio nonstop, which is such a strange feeling considering how much of a downer the song is. I struggle to think of any other songs getting radio airplay around that time that were this much of a bummer, with no other instrumentation aside from the piano accompaniment (and some string and wind instruments near the end).

Despite this, this single sold insanely well. I had to check the Wikipedia article on the single for some of the background information, but even as someone who has now owned this album twice, I had no idea that it is actually the second-highest-selling single of all time; that's just how popular it was. I believe when I first got it, it was a Christmas present. Which makes sense, considering I was only 11 when it came out, so I definitely didn't buy it myself. But I do recall wanting it, because when you're 11, it doesn't take a whole heck of a lot to get you to want to have something. You just have to put it in front of a kid over and over and over again. So, I guess it worked.

I'm not saying anything new here when I say it's kind of weird how hard this version of "Candle in the Wind" took off, when you realize that it's a song that already existed, and Elton John simply changed some of the lyrics and a slight bit of the piano composition and then called it a new tribute to Princess Diana. But perhaps that's more of a credit to Diana than it was to Elton John. Maybe the reason it sold so well was because there was practically no one who hated Diana. Even Americans--ever proud of their historically violent break-up with England--adored Diana and placed her on a pedestal. So it didn't matter that this was a repackaged version of a song written 24 years prior in dedication to Marylin Monroe. The fact that it was now dedicated to such a beloved figure as Princess Diana made all the difference in the world.

But actually, the other single packaged with it--"Something About The Way You Look Tonight"--became the song I preferred on the disc. The ballad is a far more uplifting, loving, and romantic piece, depicting the singer being breathless at the stunning visage of someone else in the room. It's a more complete song with a fuller arrangement. It's a song that I can return to under more common circumstances. It differs in that way from "Candle In The Wind 1997" because it's sort of hard to separate the latter from the passing of a very specific historical figure. It's a pretty song, but it can't exactly be played in any other moments aside from, well, the death of someone extraordinarily important to England. But "Something About The Way You Look Tonight" is a more all-encompassing love song that can be played during any number of romantic occasions. Despite the historical significance of the other single, the song with more lasting replay value honestly goes to the love song on the disc. I understand that it had been printed as a single all on its own before having been combined with this memorial disc, but I don't know that I've ever seen the individual single sold all by itself in the physical real world space before.

Out of all of the CDs I have purchased again, this one actually has the least interesting booklet insert of any of them. The front of course is the photo of the white rose. The back are the production credits. And when you open the insert, you find... absolutely nothing. Just two flat white inner pages. But I suppose that makes sense. I think they wanted this CD pressed and sold as quickly as possible, no time to design anything further than that. We have to make sales for the Diana, Princes of Wales Memorial Fund, after all--a humanitarian charity that lasted the next 15 years.

I can't say that I often returned to this CD even after I received it the first time as a kid. There's only so much replay value on a disc with only two songs, only one of which is particularly worth listening to regularly (and it's not even the more famous song on the disc). Regardless, I'm glad to have gotten it back, if only to keep it as a historical record of an event that happened within my lifetime, and physical proof that says I was there for it, even if it isn't the original copy I owned when I was 11 years old. Having the physical media is still valuable, and I would encourage anyone to seek out physical copies of the media that is in any way important to themselves, too.

I'll be back again in the near future talking about some other CD I've re-collected. If you are at all interested in hearing my thoughts on some other CDs, or helping me re-acquire some of the last few remaining discs on the list, my Amazon wish list for many of these remaining discs is available here.

Thanks for reading. Looking forward to writing another article like this one in the near future.