Searching Song Database. (a)bort (r)etry (i)gnore?

Last night at a rare restaurant date for Leah and I a song was playing. Leah said it was a cover. I knew it was not. The lyrics included these lines:

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

They also played the Vanessa Carlton cover of the song. I could NOT for the life of me, think of the original artist.

I was stuck on the fact that Q-Tip says her name in a Janet Jackson song. Of course it’s a cover of the same song.

All it took to find the answer with a computer was a bit of google this morning, and boom.

“Joni Mitchell never lies” is the thing Q-Tip says, and it’s the answer to the question of who wrote and sang that song.

The song was “Big Yellow Taxi.”

Leah was actually a little freaked out as I was trying to think of the artist. I was going into a 100 yard stare, defocusing my eyes.

I kept coming back to it. I know so many songs, and when I can’t think of something I think it must be there somewhere. The problem is that there’s no obvious timeout feature for my brain when I’m doing a search like this. It’s like, no it’s exactly like, a tune stuck in my head. And no metadata to go with it.

Very frustrating.

But dinner was lovely. Leah and I were going to go see a midnight showing of Donnie Darko at Insomniac Cinema, but we flaked out. In the end, we were too tired. Midnight movies may not be in the cards without a nap beforehand.