This column originally appeared in July 2011.
I was musing on stuff when my aimless wandering led me down the jingle path. Not jingle, as in spurs, but “jingle-writing,” as in what Charlie Sheen’s character did on the hit television show, “Two And a Half Men.” I wonder if there are still people in marketing and advertising who still write jingles? Not songs and themes for movies, but jingles for stuff like “the foaming cleanser,” and bandages that we get “stuck on,” because they “stick on (us).”
Some time ago, I found a musician I like by hunting for the person singing a song in a commercial. The commercial showed a little white dog is worrying about his bone. The dog can’t sleep and can’t decide on the safest place to store his precious asset, while a singer moans “Trouble, trouble, trouble” in the background. I found the song, named- guess- “Trouble,” which is sung by Ray LaMontagne. (Ray was a new artist to me, but Bride Two says she knew him “before he was popular.”) When advertising agencies can negotiate for the right to use an artists’ song to rep a product, why bother to hire a jingle writer?
In one episode of “Two And a Half Men,” Charlie Sheen’s character tries to get a girlfriend’s kid to eat his vegetables. He makes up a song about corn, and how it- um, retains its color and shape coming and going. Do you have to be a jingle writer to make up something like that? (It was clever, though the song used my least favorite word, the one that rhymes with “oop.”) When she was little, my youngest daughter was the crabbiest kid on the planet in the morning. When, after a night of slumber, she found that her eyes were open, she would immediately start to cry. I wrote a jingle for her — though my desperation did not identify it as such- her own song, a song crafted to encourage her to be happy in the morning. She hated it, and 20 years later, she is still crabby in the morning. Did my jingle do a face-plant, suffer an epic fail? Were I to apply for a jingle job, I would have to leave that little gem off the tape, since I could not say that it achieved the desired result: change my crabby morning kid into a sunny, happy-to-be-awake delight. And in retrospect, how much easier would it have been to change a word or two of say- a Fred Rogers’ song?
In the “change-the-words” vein, I modified the words of a popular baloney- um, “b-o-l-o-g-n-a” song as a way of teaching my grandson how to spell his name. And I made up a song that incorporated his home address and phone number as an aide to teaching those important numbers. I think the two songs worked, although I am the only one who knows all the words: my grandson knows the answers but not the songs.
The last big song that I can easily target to a product and ad campaign was for a popular cola product. Seeking singers sang of a desire to “teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony.” We can all finish the song, and those of us of a certain age can still see that gathering on a hilltop, and hear those voices, pining to “buy the world” that cola product, and “keep (it) company.” That was the last real thing, a song crafted specifically for the product by Bill Backer, Billy Davis and Roger Cook.
Now, I wonder if some sleep-aid manufacturer wants to buy the rights to my “Good Morning” song?
cjon3acd@att.net