Music for a Found Harmonium

I was in an Irish bar a few weeks ago having drinks with Jen and her friend Shari and these two guys were playing folksy Irish music. At some point I look at Jen and say, “I’ve heard this before… in the movie Napoleon Dynamite I think.”

Jen looks back and says, “OMG, you’re absolutely right.” (or something equally Jen-like).

So then I go on a quest to find out what the hell the song is, obviously it’s well known enough for Irish folk-playing duos to play, so it must be on the Internet.

I look up the movie soundtrack listing on IMDB.com (one of my smart friends told me about this feature) and look at the track listings, trying to discern which one it could be, if it’s even on there at all. There are a few candidates, and I think briefly about looking up the movie soundtrack on Amazon to see if I can listen to little 30-second snippets.

Getting distracted, and just wondering if there is such a domain name, I Google “movie music” to see if there is some service that lists all the songs in movies, even the orchestral ones, and sure enough, MovieMusic.com does pretty much exactly that, but it doesn’t tell me anything more than IMDB did, so I then give up on being smart and Google “what is the folky music in the end of Napoleon Dynamite?”.

First page. First result.

he 42 tracks on the Napoleon Dynamite soundtrack are easily crammed onto just one … and the folksy instrumental “Music For a Found Harmonium,” are MIA

Thank you Google. Thank you IMDB. Thank you Internet.

I will sleep peacefully tonight, secure in the knowledge that not only is all information available easily on the Internet, but even hard to find obscure info like this can be found with a few keystrokes on Google.

And now, for you listening and viewing pleasure, one more Google property to complete the puzzle: a video of a performance of the song I found on YouTube.