Try to remember, and if you remember, then follow

Attempting to create a post about songs with the word "Moon" in the title has revealed a giant hole in my knowledge banks (details later in the post).

First, I wrote down all the "moon" songs I could think of on my own and made an alphabetic list. (Note. Song titles are normally enclosed in quotation marks, but I have decided to dispense with quotation marks in this post so as to avoid a plethora of, you guessed it, quotation marks.) Here's the list:

Allegheny Moon
Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah Moon
Blue Moon
By The Light Of The Silvery Moon
Carolina Moon
Fly Me To The Moon
Full Moon and Empty Arms
Moonlight Bay
Moonlight Becomes You
Moonlight In Vermont
Moonlight Serenade
Moon Over Miami
Moon River
Racing With The Moon
Shine On, Harvest Moon
The Man In The Moon Is A Lady
When The Moon Comes Over The Mountain

I thought of including When The Moon Hits Your Eye Like A Big Pizza Pie but I realized at once that that is the first line of a well-known song but it isn't the title. The title is That's Amore.

Then I realized that one of the songs I did include is also just the first line of a song and not its title:

Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars
Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars
In other words, hold my hand
In other words, darlng, kiss me

Fill my heart with song and let me sing forevermore
You are all I long for, all I worship and adore
In other words, please be true
In other words, I love you.

If you're extremely slow and haven't figured out the title of that song yet, let me just spill the beans (British, enlighten you) without further ado. The title of that song is (or was, originally) In Other Words.

So I was left with 16 titles of mostly what I would call "old standards". I was feeling pretty good about myself.

Then I decided to use a search engine to see what else I might find. Perhaps you've heard of it. It's called Google.

Gott in Himmel, Sacre Bleu, and other expressions of surprise, exasperation, and dismay. I was shocked. There were over 100 songs with the word "moon" in the title, many of them in the "classic rock" category. A few artists' names I recognized, like Pink Floyd and Cat Stevens (even though I know nothing about them except their names), but I have never heard of the vast majority of the artists or the song titles. I could not begin to tell you which artists are better known than others or if one song was more popular than another. I cannot bring myself to provide you with a link. You can look them up for yourself if you care to, and if you do, tell me which ones were so pooular that I ought to have been aware of them.

It is depressing, but I will soldier on.

I will console myself concerning my great ignorance in certain areas by telling you that two musical compositions that have no words at all have "moon" in their titles. They are Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven and Clair de Lune (which means moonlight in French) by Claude Debussy. Not only that, the song Full Moon and Empty Arms is based on a theme from Piano Concerto No. 2 by Sergei Rachmaninoff.

It takes all kinds, and I am one of them.

And so are you.

P,S. -- Today is the birthday of my cousin Philip, who died in 2016 at rhe age of 81. Had he lived, he would have turned 86 today.

P.P.S. - The title of this post is from a song that did not have the word "moon" in it from The Fantasticks.