Borrowed Tunes: Roberta Flack and the Easter Beagle
Roberta Flack’s “The Closer I Get to You,” a duet with Donny Hathaway which came out in 1977, is one of the creamiest and most irresistible of all seventies soul ballads. But I think songwriters Reggie Lucas and James Mtume got some of their musical inspiration from a short scene in It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown, which came out in 1974. See what you think.
Birdhouse lounge scene in It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown (1974)
“The Closer I Get to You” (1977)
March 14th, 2010 at 10:50 pm
Ok, I totally concur, but admittedly I wouldn’t have caught that on my own.
March 17th, 2010 at 2:04 am
It’s fun to think that Charllie Brown somehow melted into the songwriters’ psyche, but who knows. Donny Hathaway, by the way, was a consistently phenomenal singer who committed suicide in ’79. This video was obviously made after the fact, with him appearing as a photographed memory. Sad.
April 19th, 2010 at 7:07 pm
I may have caught that… subconsciously, or otherwise… because of my love for the music of Roberta Flack, but it still poses the question… how DO you discover these things?
April 19th, 2010 at 7:11 pm
They discover me, old friend.