What the heck was the name of that song?

Many years ago in Ireland before the advent of MTV there was a show on TV on Sunday afternoons called MT USA, presented by a chap called Vincent "Fab Vinny" Hanley.

It was great. I remember sitting down each sunday afternoon and being glued to the TV watching ZZ Top swinging their guitars around their belt buckles, Huey Lewis and the News on that island and so on.

One afternoon I remember watching the show and there was a video on. It was about a kid in New York and his uncle was coming around. The uncle had just got out of prison and was coming to see the kid. All I could remember about the song was the chorus:

It's a fine, fine day for a reunion
It's a fine, fine day for coming home
You've done your sitting, you've done hard time
But you ain't gonna sit no more,
they can't keep you there no more
It's a fine fine day

A couple of years later that song came into my head again and I went to the record shop to try and find it. I had no clue who the artist was so I started by searching through some of the big bands of the time.

No joy.

With the advent of the web search I started searching for the damned thing but for years I drew a blank.

Then about a year ago I found it.

The song is sung by a guy called Tony Carey. Yep. I bet you never heard of him. It's not a bad song. For me it reminds me of a time. That's why I wanted to hear it again.

Since then there's a whole host of places to look up info about music. I find it a bit frustrating though if I'm looking for a discography of an artist when I want to find out what album a particular track was on, or what year for example.

What's even more frustrating is when i-Tunes does that for you and downloads rubbish information. That can happen because i-Tunes gets its song information from Gracenote. If you want an interesting read about Gracenote check out the [disputed] Wikipedia entry.

Following a read of that, I've started using an Open Source (yes, I know you are getting tired of me saying that open source is REALLY the answer to all of life's problems) web service that has the most incredible array of information on bands, singles, albums and all that.

The site is called MusicBrainz and it is brilliant.

I've been using it to lookup stuff. It's free and it's pretty much got everything listed there. As the man says, give it a lash.