Someone Else's Happy Ending

Last year, thanks to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code podcast, I discovered the music of Mike Viola and the Candy Butchers. If you like great pop music, you really ought to give “Hang on Mike” a try. One song in particular gets played at least once a week on my iPod—”What to Do With Michael.” It’s an autobiographical song about Viola’s real-life romance with a woman he met in Paris after his first wife died of cancer. She was studying abroad and he was on tour, so they had to say goodbye until they met up again in New York, where they watched “The Spirit of St. Louis” in Bryant Park on their first date. They’ve been together ever since, as Viola sings:

Now my friend, they are inseparable
She even gets that boy to go to the gym
Now if you don’t think that’s love, you must by cynical
Or maybe man, you’re just dreaming in French, yeah

‘Cause she knows what to do with Michael
She knows how to make him feel
That he’s the one, he’s his mother’s son, not like anyone
He just needed time to heal
Well that’s right, he just needed time to heal

My affection for this song is partly due to my being able to relate to parts of their story, but I think it’s also one of the most romantic songs I have heard in a while. I wondered what happened to these two (the album came out in ‘04), and I was later pleased to see that Mike Viola posted an entry on his website about his life with his wife and daughter, Isabel, including the picture below. See, you love cynics, happy endings still happen all the time!Note: This is a modified verion of an entry I made at mog.com blog last June.