Edie Brickell “Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"

Oh, it’s happened to you before. You hear a song. You know it. You can hum it. But you don’t know what it is.

One of the great joys of being a DJ, is being the search engine for listeners who are looking for “That Song!” Maybe I love it so much because it connects me to my heritage---my Grandfather was a Private Investigator, believe it or not.

People who call the station looking for “That Song” are often so apologetic. “Sorry to bother you . . .“ but I look forward to these calls. So if you are stuck on finding a tune, give me a call or shoot me an email.

I’ve got a bunch of questions for you, so, like searching for a missing person, the sooner you get to me, the more likely it is we’ll find “That Song.”

If you heard it on mvyradio, what time was it? Often, I can go back and simply look at a log of what has played. But the log is not comprehensive, so . . .

Can you give me any lyrics? The more words the better. I can often recognize it by ear, but I can do a word search to. Can’t remember a lyric?

Male or Female singer? Fast or slow? Folk or Blues or Reggae? The more details, the better.

I spent a couple of hours last week, helping a listener find a particular song. He wasn’t exactly sure what day he heard it, but he knew it had to have played between 10 and 2. He knew it was a female, with a depressed-sounding intonation. And he remembered the lyric “It’s Hard.”

At first I thought it might be Nanci Griffiths’ “It’s A Hard Life,” but I couldn’t find any evidence that it actually played during any of the times the listener had been tuned in.

So I landed upon Edie Brickell’s version of the Bob Dylan song “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

This kind of thing happens with Dylan tunes quite a bit.

There are certainly folks who aren’t crazy about Dylan’s voice, and are likely to tune him out as soon as he comes on. And his catalogue is voluminous. So there are lots of Dylan tunes that maybe you’ve heard once or twice or three times, so they are just familiar enough that when Edie Brickell or Susan Tedeschi or Cassandra Wilson or Jeff Tweedy covers it, you can hum along, but your not sure how you even know the tune.

I’m not sure I got this one right, but it was my best guess. So check out this one, from the “Born On The 4th Of July” movie soundtrack, and see if it sounds familiar.

Hear Edie Brickell “Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"

See Dylan sing it, if you don't mind the voice, here