MOG

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 pleased to see that just today 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!