So, I got the CD the other day, by the way. It IS the song (the acoustic version) that I recall so vividly from my misspent youth!!

Of course, it’s not quite as perfectly good as my memory made it out to be. In fact, listening to it in the wee hours of the morning full of anticipation as I did, the experience would have been downright anticlimactic. Fortunately I’m generally optimistic enough that that sort of thing didn’t happen. It is, indeed, still the song that stuck with me all these years, so I can feel that there has been a circle closed, an achievement made, a longing filled in my life. Huzzah.

Song of the moment: "Ridin'," Chamillionaire
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If you have access to music, you probably know what I mean. Every now and then you come across a song that sticks with you. Sometimes it’s just because it’s catchy, even if the song’s not that good (like the theme from Diff’rent Strokes), or because it really speaks to you – again, whether the song’s popular or not.

For me, for example, songs like this include Jethro Tull’s “Requiem” and “Black Satin Dancer,” Evanescence’s “Going Under,” Jay-Z’s “Dig a Hole,” Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine,” Tom Waits’s “Telephone Call from Istanbul,” Drowning Pool’s “Tear Away,” and Curve’s “Chainmail,” among many others.

But sometimes there’s a song that does more than just stick. It lodges deep in the core of your being, caught and fused there by some strange, unreasonable resonance, only to arise unbidden at the strangest of times. It comes to you like that face in the crowd that you could swear was your high-school crush, or like the smell of your favorite relative’s homemade whatever that just stops you in your tracks. Songs like truly haunt you, and they don’t come along very often; now that I’m on the far side of 30, I’m glad to say I have a couple under my belt.

The one I’m thinking of right now, that I woke up with this morning, is “Fade to Black,” by His Boy Elroy. No, it’s not a cover of any other songs by that title; it’s an original. It first showed up on HBE’s debut, eponymous album back in 1993, but I heard a special radio single later on, probably in the summer of ‘94, when I was an undergrad in central Iowa.

There’s a pretty good review, titled “A Moment of Perfect Beauty,” written by a person who evidently feels much as I do about it. The thing is, as noted in the review, this radio version is actually not the same as the version on the album. I have not heard that album, but the reviewer’s description of the song was pretty right on. It didn’t make me weep whenever I heard it, but it always caught my attention, always touched me and shifted the direction of my thoughts and my day. It had angsty, depressed lyrics and an insistent driven-ness that are found with hard rock, but it was dominated by an acoustic guitar and strong, clear vocal work.

I believe that what we heard – and fell in love with – is actually an acoustic version of a more rock-n-roll-style original.

I say “I believe” because I don’t actually own this song. I couldn’t find the album back in the day, and I moved to Chicago in ‘95. Every now and then the song would pop into my head – I can still hear almost every note of it – and I would go online in search of it. For several years, I couldn’t find any mention of the song. I came tantalizingly close once, when I found a page (it seems to have disappeared now) that had both “Fade to Black” and “His Boy Elroy” appearing in its content. The album review I found was resoundingly unflattering, and I thought that they couldn’t be talking about the same band. Eventually, by 2003 or so, I gave up on the search altogether. In fact, I came close to believing that I had the song name or band name wrong, and I was simply doomed to live with it only in my memory.

Which was not tragic, actually. As I said, I remember almost every note to this day.

But this morning, I woke up with the tune in my head, and I decided to go looking again on a whim. Turns out that the song’s author posted a response to “A Moment of Perfect Beauty.” Johnny Fly is his name. (There’s another response in the wake of his post, too.) There are also mentions of the song elsewhere (like Yahoo! Music and last.fm), and the out-of-print CD can be found on eBay and Amazon, among other places. There’s also, incidentally, a dance/electronica artist going by the name “hisboyelroy,” which makes the search a little harder. Of course, what really stood out was that there was still no radio version to be had, and the one real review I could find (actually posted in more than one place), while positive, confirmed through its wording that the album version is not the radio single I treasure in my audio soul.

What is the import of all this? Two things. First, with the advent of the techno hisboyelroy, I fear that the data trace, the shadow of this tune I love may be lost. Therefore I write this to memorialize it, in my own way. Second, though, I did find one disc on eBay that looked promising. It was a single, “Fade to Black” by His Boy Elroy, “RARE 3 TRK DJCD.” Could this be the long-lost radio single? The photo of the case shows the three tracks: the first is “Remix”; the third is “LP Version.” But track two is listed as “Acoustic.” Oh my! Dare I get my hopes up? Well, I’ve dared. The thing was $1 plus $2.85 s/h, so I didn’t have much to lose.

We’ll see…

Song of the moment: "Fade to Black," His Boy Elroy


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