I've heard it too many times to ignore it

February 23, 2023 11:31 AM

(youtube link) Rainbow Connection performed Choir! Choir! Choir! and Kermit the Frog Choir! Choir! Choir! (previously) and Kermit the Frog (previously) perform the Paul Williams (previously, also previously) classic. PS: There really aren't that many songs about Rainbows.
posted by DigDoug (42 comments total)

There really aren't that many songs about Rainbows
Article is entirely about "songs about rainbows" and they completely miss Dio's Rainbow In The Dark? For shame.
posted by xedrik at 11:47 AM on February 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

PS: There really aren't that many songs about Rainbows

We just haven't found it yet, the rainbow connection....

...someday?
posted by chavenet at 11:47 AM on February 23, 2023

I have said this elsewhere, but: we've watched The Muppet Movie as a family three times this month and real talk here: I have walked this earth for nearly five decades, and despite having Lived Some, having Seen Some Things, I will start tearing up immediately at the sound of a frog puppet playing a pretend miniature banjo and singing about rainbows.
posted by mhoye at 11:48 AM on February 23, 2023 [37 favorites]

Heh, I have a draft of a song somewhere, I don't think I ever even did a scratch recording, rewriting the rest of Rainbow Connection after the "...other side?" line to be entirely about refuting the premise and contemplating hallucination, confabulation, and other thought dysfunction explanations for the mistake.

It's still a lovely song and one that feels like it deserves the trucker key change. The choir treatment is nice though I wish it were still more banjo forward, given how much work Rainbow Connection has to do in the limited popular consciousness of banjo music to offset Deliverance jokes.
posted by cortex at 11:50 AM on February 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

I can't watch this yet because "The Rainbow Connection" is a song I cannot listen to any version of without crying like a baby and I have a meeting in five minutes. But this is a wonderful idea.
posted by thivaia at 11:52 AM on February 23, 2023 [9 favorites]

(The Kermit version is the critical one, but in case you're looking for another--and you feel emotionally stable enough to listen to it--the Willie Nelson cover slays)
posted by thivaia at 11:53 AM on February 23, 2023 [11 favorites]

I can't watch this yet because "The Rainbow Connection" is a song I cannot listen to any version of without crying like a baby

Somebody said "Gonzo at the campfire" to me today and I damn near needed to cancel my next meeting.
posted by mhoye at 12:00 PM on February 23, 2023 [17 favorites]

I understand, mhoye
posted by DigDoug at 12:04 PM on February 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

This is really pretty. I miss Jim so much.
posted by PussKillian at 12:06 PM on February 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

I mean, it's a good joke to take it literally, but "songs about rainbows" is a metaphor, I'm pretty sure.
posted by surlyben at 12:07 PM on February 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

I also came to this thread to say thank you and that I'll have to listen to it later because I will cry. Jim Henson is one of the few pure things to come from my hometown, and listening to this song feels like looking at the water and the cypress trees -- the swamp, yes, it's beautiful -- without any sorrow.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:23 PM on February 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

I was looking for the Kacey Musgraves song 'Rainbow,' but got distracted by this shiny thing.
posted by box at 12:24 PM on February 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Somebody said "Gonzo at the campfire" to me today and I damn near needed to cancel my next meeting.

I'm Going To Go Back There Someday is a nearly perfect song expressing a specific sentiment we've all felt but never had words for.

And now I'm crying after typing that.
posted by hippybear at 12:27 PM on February 23, 2023 [8 favorites]

I had to quickly end that video, I was going to start ugly crying
posted by wheelieman at 12:58 PM on February 23, 2023

I don't do bucket lists, but if I could sing Rainbow Connection with Kermit and a ton of strangers my life would be mightily enriched.
posted by Ookseer at 12:59 PM on February 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

I hope no one will mind if I point again to the absolutely wonderful short story Tomorrow is Waiting, which is about Kermit and songs, but not rainbows. (I made a FPP, Tomorrow is Waiting (Still) almost exactly a year ago today, in honor of brainwane's original post almost 10 years ago!)

There are more than 100 versions of "The Rainbow Connection" (Johnny Mathis! Willie Nelson! Sarah McLachlan! Weezer! Kenny Drew Jr.!) ... and also actually quite a lot of songs about rainbows, or at least with "rainbow" in the title.

This is a wonderful post, and a lovely conversation. Thank you for creating this, DigDoug, and thanks to all of you for joining in, you lovers and dreamers.
posted by kristi at 1:10 PM on February 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

Paul Williams really knew how to write material that hit you in the feels
posted by wheelieman at 1:10 PM on February 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

(My more practical take on the dubious "songs about rainbows" claim is that an earlier draft of that lyric had something like "stories about rainbows", which would line up a lot better with the vibe of folk mythology etc., but it just didn't scan as well.)
posted by cortex at 1:12 PM on February 23, 2023

I am way too terminally online in lefty spaces as I just assume “Kermit” is a derogatory nickname for Jordan Peterson whenever I see it.

Anyway, In Rainbows is a near perfect album, though I can’t really say that “Reckoner” (from which the album title comes) is really about rainbows.
posted by supercres at 1:19 PM on February 23, 2023

Um... She's a Rainbow by the Rolling Stones. I didn't notice this song mentioned anywhere, but I might have missed it. It's a very well known song.
posted by SoberHighland at 1:23 PM on February 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

I really like the way Choir! (etc.) encourages the audience to be part of the performance, and the video shots showing the audience just made the screen blurry here.

Years ago I saw something on TV about Paul Williams. It was when the song 'Short People' came out, and someone ask Paul what he thought about it. He said (in my memory) 'It's an OK song, but it's a little long.'
posted by MtDewd at 1:35 PM on February 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Glad to see the Box Top's 'Neon Rainbow' in the list; wasn't surprised that John Sebastian's Rainbows All Over Your Blues was missing, even though he sang it at Woodstock!

If, like to me, the first song means more to you than Muppets, here's the Box Tops performing it in 2009, a year before the death of Alex Chilton.
posted by Rash at 1:57 PM on February 23, 2023

an earlier draft of that lyric had something like "stories about rainbows", which would line up a lot better with the vibe of folk mythology etc., but it just didn't scan as well.

"Tales", perhaps?
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:08 PM on February 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

will start tearing up immediately at the sound of a frog puppet playing a pretend miniature banjo and singing about rainbows
Same. That song has always meant so much to me.
I couldn't watch much of the video, though, because I miss singing in a choir - or in a minyan for that matter - too much. I don't know if I'll ever feel safe doing so again, and that is a whole other level of meaning to the song for me these days.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 2:24 PM on February 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Didn't cross over to the pop charts, but 'Chasin' That Neon Rainbow' had its day.
posted by box at 2:29 PM on February 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

So the part I usually break down at is "We know that it's probably magic" but right at that moment a C!C!C! member holds up a floppy Kermit doll (2:05) and I cracked up instead.

And then I started bawling at "I've heard them calling my name."

Will I ever not cry at this song? Probably not. Will I ever forget how wonderful and sacred it is that groups can come together again like this again? Never, never, never.
posted by kimberussell at 3:25 PM on February 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

shit man I welled up a little just reading this thread
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:59 PM on February 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

If you want to fall down a Choir! Choir! Choir! hole—and I suggest you do—get yourself to a basement in Toronto with Rick Astley and have a sing-song.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 5:06 PM on February 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

My heart is lifted every time I listened to Shine Like Rainbows. Yes, it's an Equestria Girls song, but damn! Rainbow Rocks was an incredible movie! What heart was not moved by the redemption arc of Sunset Shimmer? "I was a demon! A raging she-demon!" "Yep, you were pretty bad!" But in the end Sunset Shimmer was a true friend.

There's a scene in Rainbow Rocks where Twilight Sparkle has re-entered the Canterlot High School Universe and falls down. Sunset offers her hand to help her up and Twilight is hesitant. (I'm serious: RAGING SHE-DEMON!) But Twilight takes Sunset's hand and that, dear friends, is why Twilight is Best Pony.
posted by SPrintF at 5:58 PM on February 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

A Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem cover of SWLABR would have totally worked.
posted by mubba at 6:29 PM on February 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

→ the Willie Nelson cover slays

It does indeed. We played it at the memorial of a dear friend who died far, far too young and everybody utterly lost it
posted by scruss at 6:57 PM on February 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

All I need to hear is the first banjo lick and I turn into a sobbing mess.

The organ arrangement from Jim’s memorial service is pretty awesome.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:58 PM on February 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

It occurs to me that Disney could do a lot worse than doing a full high resolution restoration project on The Muppet Movie and re-releasing it to theaters. There's an entire generation that might be getting to grandkids-to-the-movies age, truly.
posted by hippybear at 7:04 PM on February 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

They showed it in theaters a few years ago. May have been an anniversary? But I don't know if it was in HD or not.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:28 PM on February 23, 2023

Same performance from another angle
posted by DreamerFi at 3:46 AM on February 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

(and that's actually rainbow three times in a row, followed by wonderful world)
posted by DreamerFi at 3:47 AM on February 24, 2023

There's also Patti Austin's What's at the end of a rainbow( from the album End of a Rainbow).
posted by bleston hamilton station at 4:42 AM on February 24, 2023

The organ arrangement from Jim’s memorial service is pretty awesome.

The "One Person" performance is the one that ruins me. All of them hit me, but that song is the one that I think I was least familiar with in any other setting.
posted by DigDoug at 5:45 AM on February 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

The real question, apparently, is why such a simple song reduces so many Gen Xers to tears. (I mean, it's not really a difficult question to answer - the original Muppet Movie was the first movie I ever saw in theaters and I probably watched it hundreds of times as a kid, so the Muppets are an indelible part of my childhood and, presumably, yours also.) My only complaint about this performance is that they didn't return to the bridge at the end for the la-di-das, which is one of my favorite parts.

The "One Person" performance is the one that ruins me. All of them hit me, but that song is the one that I think I was least familiar with in any other setting.

Oddly enough, that song comes from the otherwise-not-very-good Snoopy! The Musical (not You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, but its ill-fated 1975 sequel). But Henson liked the song and included it in a Muppet Show episode sung by Bernadette Peters, so it popped up occasionally.

Even more oddly, in the summer of 1990, at age 14, I played the title role in Snoopy! in summer camp. So, when I saw the Muppets perform this song just a few months later (either at Henson's funeral or in the TV special that November), I was intimately familiar with the song and was just inconsolable. It's always a little weird to mourn a celebrity that you don't know personally, but Henson's death is one I don't think I'll ever get over.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 7:01 AM on February 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

Mr. Nat and I used Rainbow Connection for our first dance. We’re milleni-olds, not quite genx, but we still both tear up at this song.

Semi related, two things we had to cancel due to the pandemic were our original wedding (planned for March 2020) and a set of choir choir choir tickets we got with friends for their tour that year. The wedding happened (with 1/10 the people much later), but we never did get to see choir choir choir.

We should look into that.

In other news, one of my favorite books is Light and Color in the Outdoors, a really lovely treatment using undergrad level physics to explain all sorts of interesting natural light phenomena, including rainbows. And so I want a version of this song talking about how awesome Airy functions are and deriving how they describe the fringes in rainbows.
posted by nat at 5:54 PM on February 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

how awesome Airy functions are

Earthy functions can be fun too...but that's a topic for another thread.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:33 PM on February 24, 2023

—get yourself to a basement in Toronto...
I can't believe I'm tearing up and getting RickRoll'd at the same time.
posted by MtDewd at 11:51 AM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]