As I sit here listening to Jurassic 5 (via grooveshark.com), blogging to whoever in the world wants to listen, and watching live sports updates for the Cubs game (not that I actually care about that when the Reds are 1/2 a game out), I am also searching into the past to solve a mystery so trivial to everyone else in the world that I'm almost embarrassed to tell you what it is. But I will:
There is an easy listening song called "Adiemus." Have a listen.
Now, for whatever the hell reason, this is a song that I've loved since my childhood. I fondly remember that it was one of my very first Napster downloads, and it's been a part of my music collection ever since. So, yesterday at work, for some strange reason, the song comes on the classical radio station my boss forces us to listen to. I, sarcastic cretin that I can sometimes be, said to my boss, "Now, I don't mean to quibble with your 'classical' radio station, but they just played a song by Enya."
I returned to making telephone calls, grinning smugly at myself, when a coworker piped up to say, "What are you talking about? This isn't Enya."
The mystery was afoot!
I could have sworn that Enya had written "Adiemus." Napster told me so. It was as if my coworker was taking one of my most treasured nuggets of knowledge and crushing it into oblivion. And he had information to back up his claim: according to him, "Adiemus" was written by Welsh composer Karl Jenkins.
Well, now I just had to know. I couldn't have the origin of one of my favorite songs, a tune that I've had memorized since I was ten years old, in question. Luckily, Google.com was there to help me navigate the rabbit hole of history. Here's what I found:
According to Wikipedia, "Adiemus" was indeed composed by Karl Jenkins as part of a series of albums entitled (fittingly) "Adiemus." Mystery solved right? BUT, why in the world would I have thought the song was composed by Enya? Normally, that easy listening mogul doesn't even register on my radar. There must have been a reason that I thought she was responsible for this strangely addicting and somewhat (somehow) popular piece.
Apparently, too, I was not the only one in the world who thought that "Adiemus" was credited to Enya. Typing "Adiemus" into Google yields just as many results that credit Enya with the song as Karl Jenkins, possibly more. There are youtube hits that have Enya as the composer as well. But Enya's Wikipedia page doesn't list "Adiemus" as a song on any of her albums.
Now, fairly certain that Karl Jenkins was indeed the composer of "Adiemus," I searched Google for the phrase, "Who wrote 'Adiemus'". After swimming through a sea of chat boards, I finally found one where somebody said, "I could have sworn that I saw that Enya wrote the song on the Pure Moods CD or something."
The light bulb moment!
I remembered Pure Moods - an easy listening CD that was marketed ad nauseum on television when I was a kid (probably on Nickelodeon since that's all that I watched). Yes... it was all coming back to me - some commercial where they also played that song from Exorcist. And there was this part with a bunch of candles...
A quick trip to youtube yielded this:
Yes! That's it! That was the commercial! I call this the "Rosebud Moment" where I recover a touching little memory from my childhood.
The commercial does indeed accurately credit the song "Adiemus" as being by Adiemus (the name of Jenkins's album series). Hmm... here's what I think happened:
Both the first song on the commercial and the song that plays just before "Adiemus" are written by Enya, so I'm guessing that someone, some IDIOT, who was among the first people to post the song online on Napster (five years after Pure Moods came out) made a mistake and credited "Adiemus" to Enya. Now, over ten years later, because of the millions of downloads the song must have had (through Napster and other sites) the original mistake has been disseminated all around the internet until, finally, Enya and "Adiemus" are inseparable. Poor Karl Jenkins will go through the rest of his life getting only a partial credit for what is, to me, a very fine song.
Though the whole episode illustrates a danger of the internet (that is, that its information is often perceived as exact yet is prone to falsehood), it also demonstrates the unbelievable beauty of the availability of information on the web. How exciting that we live in a time when, in a matter of minutes, I can search swaths of information in order to find a tiny mistake almost 20 years old! Even 25 years ago, such trivial misinformations were relegated to the dumpster of history. Tiny mysteries like this surely were not important enough to warrant making even a couple phone calls to solve (and perhaps even more work would have been required).
And I, personally, would have been driven CRAZY not knowing the truth. How often does one get acutely bothered by a song in your head that you don't know the name to? Well, as the saying goes, there's an App for that. There's a proverbial App for everything, and they provide more than just a simple service. They provide reassurance that for any, ANY desire that gnaws at oneself, by spending just a few minutes on the information superhighway, we can move past it and return (unstressed) to a relaxed quietude.
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