Anne Francis

It’s mind-boggling how technology now permeates our lives (especially if there are young people in your life)–and sometimes in delightful ways.

The other night I was watching TV with my family, which used to be an increasingly rare event in this internet-addled age, until we got a PVR (we’ll call this exhibit 1), which lets us “tape” and watch our favourite shows whenever we want.

Anyway, whoever was in charge of the clicker must have been dozing, because we usually fast-forward through the commercials (exhibit 2)… and we find ourselves watching a commercial (later I discovered it was for Enterprise Car Rental) when this really great song starts playing.

Our ears perk up, because we love this song and we’ve heard it before; but none of us can remember where.

So my eldest, who is 17, says, “I can Shazam it!” She pulls out her Blackberry, with this app called Shazam, which will identify a song from a snippet of a recording, such as on a commercial (exhibit 3).

She rewinds the commercial (exhibit 4) and holds her phone up to the TV for a few bars. Shazam tells her the song is Send Me On My Way, by a band called Rusted Root. (They’re from Pittsburgh, in case you didn’t know.)

“Oh, darn,” she says. “I just realized, I don’t care what the song is, I want to know where I’ve heard it before!”

So she looks up the song on YouTube (exhibit 5), and finds out it played during one of the final scenes in the animated movie Ice Age.

“Oh yeah!” says her brother. “Now I remember.” I, too, vaguely remembered grooving to it while watching the movie in the theatre.

“But wait, that’s not it,” said the eldest. “I’m sure I heard it before that.” And I had a vague sense, myself, that I had thought the song was familiar even when I heard it in Ice Age. (Or I could be making that up. But I don’t think so.)

So she hunts further. (Online, of course.) Then she gets it–the Eureka moment.

“Matilda!” she cries. “It was in Matilda!”

“Oh yeah!” we said.

Great movies. And a GREAT song. Maybe you’ll recognize it.

Enjoy.