Feeling alive.
November 14th, 2006
A couple of days ago, I happened across a commercial on television (for the life of me I can’t remember what for, go figure) with a catchy, upbeat and playful sort of feel. It reminded me of my childhood. It reminded me of road trips with the windows down. It reminded me of summer vacation. It reminded me of Atom and His Package. I had to add this song to my repertoire, and fast. One problem: like most ads, this one had no intention of revealing either the creative studio that produced it, or the creator of the song. No problem, this is the age of the internet.
I jotted down some of the lyrics in my head and jumped on the ole’ computer and did a google search. The initial results turned up some seemingly dead end leads on adtunes.com, but after scrolling through a lot of “yeah I want to know what that song is!” posts I eventually came across someone who actually knew the origins of the song(in a manner of speaking). They directed me to the website of Mophonics, a creative agency that creates and/or “finds” (I say finds because well, I’ll get to that later) music for advertisements. The song, I found out is called “I’m Feeling alive”, and it is by Gomo (or Paulo Gouveia to his parents) who is from Portugal. Apparently this and another single was fairly popular in Portugal. I wish I could tell you more about the guy, but this is about all I could dig up on him (there are other sites with bios, but they are all the same, word for word… go internet!)
Without further ado, here is “I’m Feeling Alive” by Gomo. EDIT: 11/25 Now with English Titles! (thanks Brain)
Now that you have heard that, go to Mophonics and listen to the version on their site. Since they claim they do remixes as well as composing I’m assuming they remixed this song, although I can’t really see how.
P.S. HUGE bonus points for anyone who can remind me of what commercial this song came from.
—d
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 12:32 pm and is filed under music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Never heard the song before; i think i would have remembered it. Pop-tastic! Could have done without Theodore Chipmunk singing those bits though.
November 14th, 2006 at 8:15 pmI wish i spoke Portuguese, dang it.
I’m of no help, either. I speak a bit of Portuguese, but I think YouTube has a version with the teal screens in English.
However, I would like to say that this is an interesting phenomenon I’ve experienced lately, that of a commercial with a hip music track that created in me the narcotic need to track it down. I was watching Sunday morning politishows and enjoying the ambiguous high-echelon commercials about tech and invest and such. BANG. The most glorious pop song “Every Day Feels Like Sunday,” which sounded so familiar though I’d never heard it before. Turns out to be Of Montreal of the glorious Elephant 6.
Wait, it gets weirder.
The song was on a bonus EP from their latest album, Sunlandic Twins, which has a single whose video has appeared on MTV2 (Incidentally, it’s a fun little flat graphic animation done by The Kangaroo Alliance from Athens, GA–check it out at their website). This song sounded so very familiar and made me think of sirloins and bloomin onions, of all things.
Turns out, some hip kid at an ad agency representing Outback Steakhouse asked the band if they could rewrite the song as a jingle. It’s weird because my wife and I had been talking for weeks about how cool and hip and catchy in all the right ways that jingle was. Watch the video on www.kangarooalliance.com and tell me you haven’t heard this song as a jingle a hundred times.
November 24th, 2006 at 12:04 pm