“Someday We’ll Know” (New Radicals cover) by Mandy Moore & Jon Foreman, Monday, October 7, 2024
Everything’s a bit connected with this month’s playlist which has given me new life when writing my blog. It started with watching the FX show English Teacher, which was featured in the trailer and episode 5 “Field Trip” with Brian Jordan Alvarez as Evan Marquez singing New Radical’s “You Get What You Give.” Interestingly Tyson Motsenbocker, with his covers project, also released a cover of “You Get What You Give.” I wanted not to include many repeat posts this month because it’s one of the things that made my blog seem stale to me, but I also wanted to include songs that I was enjoying over interesting stories to tell. And then I listened to New Radical’s Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too. The band broke up soon after releasing the single “Someday We’ll Know.” Last year, I ran across the Jon[athan] Foreman/Mandy Moore duet cover of “Someday We’ll Know.” This year, I decided that it’s time to dust off the truly cheesy song and just enjoy it for what it is. Rather than repeating the stories about Switchfoot’s breakout moment, just read the post about “Dare You to Move.”
IS TRUE LOVE ONLY ONCE IN A LIFETIME? Holding a 29% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the 2002 film adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ novel, A Walk to Remember, may not remembered fondly by many other than a certain demographic of grown-up youth group kids who watched the PG film at sleepovers and lock-ins. I’ll discuss the plot of the movie with some spoilers. My sister watched it at her sleepover birthday party, but I never actually watched the movie. I played guitar in my room with a friend who spent the night. I did want to watch the movies because Switchfoot’s music was featured in it. My sister later admitted that the movie’s plot was dumb and that many of her friends were distracted by the young up-and-coming heartthrob Shane West who played the film’s non-believer Landon Carter opposite the Baptist preacher’s daughter Jamie Sullivan played by Mandy Moore. Landon falls in love with the preacher’s daughter who has terminal leukemia, though he doesn’t know that she is sick until he falls in love with her. The movie helped to reinforce the purity culture of the ‘00s with the young lovers waiting until marriage--Landon proposes and the two marry before Jamie dies. The song “Someday We’ll Know” is played right after Landon finds out about the cancer in the middle of the film.
I’M SPEEDING BY YOUR PLACE FOR THE NINETY-SEVENTH TIME TONIGHT.
“Someday We’ll Know,” has even more head-scratching lines than New Radical’s other hit “You Get What You Give.” The song asks many cliched questions about answers to questions we may never know. Asking questions about “Whatever happened to Amelia Earhart?” and “Did the captain of the Titanic really cry?” and then pledging in faith “Someday we’ll know” the answers to these questions. Songwriter Gregg Alexander throws in nods to the Jahovah’s Witness faith that he grew up in, evoking religious language about Samson and Delilah and of love moving mountains. All of the questions lead up to the cringiest question of all: “Why you weren’t meant for me.” The song is forgivable with all of the weird lyrics on Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too, an album that keenly comments on celebrity culture, capitalism, and religion. In the context of a cliched movie about a teen dying of cancer, perhaps the question “Someday we’ll know why I wasn’t meant for you” actually makes the story seem real. Unfortunately, the song’s placement in the movie is only incidental background music like the movies from the ‘00s that used music when licensing was cheap. Listening to the song in the context of a literally fatal romance makes both the movie and the song better. What a missed opportunity to score maybe a 45% on Rotten Tomatoes.
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