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I’ll admit that the David Lynch / David Foster Wallace coincidences were within the realm of predictability.  And so might this even longer strand of interconnections… but it is peculiar enough to bear mentioning.

A little while ago I was presented with a compact disc by The Field to review for Exclaim! I hadn’t gotten around to listening to it when Exclaim!’s editor James Keast called me to ask if I could be ready to do an interview with The Field, who is also known as Axel Willner, within the next day or two.  Never one to turn down pay for writing I agreed and commenced the compressed listening period to a acquaint myself with the album and prep some questions.

This period of preparation happened to coincide with a weekend where I’d be without easy internet access.  That wouldn’t really pose a problem as I had the provided bio from the label and some pre-existing knowledge of Willner’s previous work… a 2007 album called From Here We Go Sublime that had unexpectedly sparked glowing critical accolades.  I say unexpected because the album was almost entirely electronic, sample-based, small “d” dance music that usually coasts under the radar of most non-electronic music critics.  This new album, Yesterday and Today, seemed to react to this praise by embracing pop elements more fully and also make the beats even less dance-bombastic.

One track halfway into the album was titled “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime,” and it featured a few repeated lyrics over the first half of the composition.  Now… I knew that I knew these words.  I knew that I had heard them somewhere before.  Rather than make an inconvenient pilgrimage to an internet-enriched area I chose to believe that these lyrics, like much of the music, were merely sampled or repurposed from an earlier source.  Mentally I made the handwashing motion that implied “that’s that.”

I spoke with Willner on the telephone early Monday morning.  He was in Stockholm where it was about 5 hours ahead.  There were sounds of children playing in what I assume was a park in the background, so he must have been on a cell phone outdoors.  For some reason this struck me as strange.  The interview went well.  The song was discussed, but only in terms of it’s instrumental progression (I asked about the blend of 70s/80s styles… I believe I mentioned Alan Parsons and The Cure).  The article was to be under 300 words so a long talk wasn’t necessary.  Stockholm is far away.

I had a few days to organize the article, and in the meantime I had been saving an episode of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse to watch since Friday.  You can find out about the show if you care to, but most important to this little narrative was the pre-end-credit segment of the program.  As is the style of many current hour long dramas the last few minutes of the show was a montage of scenes that interconnected the isolated characters of the story with a mournful song to drive home the underlying emotional state (usually sadness).  The song used for this closing montage: “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime.”  Except it wasn’t the track I had been listening to on Yesterday and Today, it was the version that I had heard before.  And I suddenly realized it was a track by Beck used in the opening moments of the Michel Gondry / Charlie Kaufmann film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Duh.

Now I went to my CD shelf and pulled out Beck’s Sea Change, the album I believed featured the track.  But no.  Then I remembered it was actually a cover of an even earlier song, and that it appeared only on the film’s soundtrack.  Since I had the movie but not the soundtrack I popped it in and went to the end credits to find the original source of the song was an 80s group called The Korgis.  Yup.

The following evening, in an internet-having part of the world, I was working on the article and decided to look into The Korgis, if only to find out if I might hear the original song.  There was a 30 second clip for preview purposes at Allmusic.com, where I also read the brief bio of the band.  One salient point was that a member of the Korgis had been a member of an earlier group called Stackridge.  This point stuck out because I remembered that we had a Stackridge album in the racks at Backstreet from quite some time.  Huh.

So the following day at the store a customer happened to ask about The Field’s new album.  That in and of itself not a great coincidence.  I “thrilled” him with my little tale of The Field / Beck / Korgis connect the dots.  He left… not because of the story… just because that’s what people do when they’re done shopping.  And the very next person in… a regular and somewhat peculiar character when it comes to musical obsessions… and not usually a vinyl buyer… browsed for a little while and came to the counter with… the Stackridge album.  Gleep.