The Albums of My Life: The WHEN HARRY MET SALLY Soundtrack

When I was a kid and I first started buying my own music with my own allowance money, I bought nothing but soundtracks and filmscores. My parents thought it very weird, but I loved that music and I love it to this day. But as I moved into adolescence and discovered my loves of both classical and rock, those genres took over and I don't think I bought a single soundtrack album after 1985…until sometime in 1989 or 1990, when I bought the soundtrack album to the film When Harry Met Sally.

I was about to say that When Harry Met Sally was my first serious rom-com, but that's just not the case. As I look back over my life of consuming stories, I'm realizing–rather belatedly, I admit–that romance has always been a big part of it all. (I am only just now beginning to incorporate romance novels into my regular reading, but more on that another time.) I mean, I'm a kid who grew up at least in part watching The Love Boat, so how could I not love a good love story? So no, When Harry Met Sally wasn't my first rom-com. But there was something a bit different about it, wasn't there? It's structured as a series of vignettes, it takes place over a decade of story time, it saves the realization of love until the very end…and it's the first time I saw a rom-com that leaned as heavily on music as this one does.

When Harry Met Sally is loaded with classics from "the Great American Songbook", to the point that the movie is almost a good starter set for exploring those songs. As I had also grown up watching the great musicals of the mid-2oth century (thanks, Mom!), I was already well down that path already…but I loved the songs in When Harry Met Sally so much that I had to have the soundtrack album.

(A word about soundtrack albums and how I collected them: I only bought the filmscores. Movies like Top Gun, whose soundtrack albums were all compilations of rock tunes used in the movies, were not my thing.)

I found myself deeply surprised when I played the album the first time, though. In the movie the classic recordings of many of those songs were used: Frank Sinatra singing "It Had To Be You", Bing Crosby singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", Louis Armstrong singing "Our Love Is Here To Stay". None of these are on the soundtrack album. No, the album features versions of those songs, none of which are used in the film, and all of which are performed by Harry Connick Jr.

And no, this did not bother me.

Well, OK, it did at first. But I got over it.

The actual When Harry Met Sally soundtrack album is a Harry Connick Jr. album. Only one track of it actually is heard in the film as it's heard on the album: the jazz trio version of "It Had To Be You" that opens the movie. (You do hear a few Connick Jr. performances in the film, but none of them are the ones on the album.) That makes this album kind of unique: to my knowledge it's the only soundtrack album I've ever encountered that includes virtually no music as it is heard in the film itself. Now, I would eventually learn that this was actually a common practice with film soundtrack albums during the 50s and 60s, when entire albums were re-recordings and not the takes that were used in the films, but even those usually used the same arrangements and the same performers. No, the When Harry Met Sally album is an interesting item.

Luckily, it's also good.

The album is a tight 38 minutes long and does not overstay its welcome at all. Plus, it's varied throughout: there are big-band arrangements alongside small trio renditions, and it's all bound together by Connick Jr.'s strong piano playing and surprisingly strong vocals. I say "surprising" because Connick Jr. was no more than twenty-two years old when he made this album, but he honestly sounds like he's been around for a lot longer than that, so confidently and assuredly does he make his way through this repertoire.

This album was on my "college playlist" all throughout my four years there, even at a time when the word "playlist" was at least ten years away from my vocabulary and when my primary means of music consumption was the cassette on my Walkman. (And it wasn't even a Walkman, technically.) While I wasn't in need of a gateway to the "Great American Songbook", as such gateways go, this one was one of the best. This type of soundtrack would become a bit of cliche later on in the 1990s, as When Harry Met Sally screenwriter Nora Ephron started directing prolifically; I remember seeing some critical grousing along the lines of "Here's a new Nora Ephron movie, which means it's time for another tour of Nora Ephron's record collection," which was probably unfair, and in this case it doesn't matter anyway. When Harry Met Sally remains a favorite film and a favorite album.

Until next time,
-K.