Almost Like Being In Love

Album: Portrait of Sinatra: Columbia Classics (1947)
Charted: 20
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Songfacts®:

  • "Almost Like Being In Love" is arguably the outstanding song from the 1947 Alan Jay Lerner/Frederick Loewe musical Brigadoon, and is certainly the most widely recorded.

    In the 1954 film version it is performed by Gene Kelly in the presence of his fellow game hunter, who looks almost as perplexed as the highland cattle and the pig to whom the song is also addressed. Unsurprisingly, Kelly also dances, and this particular routine is far from dissimilar from the one he performed two years earlier in Singin' In The Rain, albeit without the umbrella.

    "Almost Like Being In Love" has also been recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Cliff Richard, among others. >>>
    Suggestion credit:
    Alexander Baron - London, England
  • Frank Sinatra was one of the first artists to record this in 1947 and also had the highest chart position at #20.
  • Before hitting the Broadway stage, Lerner and Loewe's musical premiered in New Haven, Connecticut, on Groundhog Day in 1947. Coincidentally, Nat King Cole's version of the song closes the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. After enduring the same day over and over again, Murray's character finally wakes up to a new day. He kisses MacDowell as Cole beings crooning, "What a day this has been..." His version was also used in the 1995 comedy Grumpier Old Men, starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.
  • According to Mark Steyn's A Song for the Season, Brigadoon's choreographer, Agnes de Mille, told Lerner and Loewe to cut the song from the show. de Mille's name was backed by a lot of star power beyond her own illustrious career as a dancer and choreographer. She came from a prominent showbiz family that included hotshot Hollywood directors - her dad, William C. de Mille, and her uncle, Cecil B. DeMille (who would direct the classic Sunset Boulevard a few years later). Lerner and Loewe were unfazed and, thankfully, kept it in.

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