So there.  :)

I’m in San Francisco this week, the weekend and part of next week doing the @Uber thing.  Uber is moving offices this weekend and I’ll be helping out as I need the exercise.  But enough about me, lets get to the music and why I don’t care what you may or may not think of this post.

I grew up with Saturday Night Live (SNL).  It started airing in 1975 which means, technically, I was way too young to watch it but I saw plenty of those early episodes anyway.  At some point over the years, my oldest daughter noticed that there seemed to be quite a lot of famous people that would cycle through the cast.  Indeed, that is true.  Many, many great comedic actors got their start on SNL and when you look through that Wikipedia article above you will be pretty impressed with the lineup that has appeared as cast members on SNL over the years.

SNL goes through its ups and downs with the cast, but one thing remains consistent (at least for as long as I can remember) and its the closing song at the end of the show that the band plays live.  This song, through osmosis, has come to mean many things to me even when I just hear a few notes of it playing while I’m flipping channels and happen to catch the end of an SNL re-run.  If you’ve ever seen the end of an SNL show you know that everyone comes out on stage and the guest host thanks everyone and then there’s a general round of congrats all around for a job well done.  For going down in the history of the show.  For cranking out an entire show, rehearsing it and then doing it LIVE for the entire nation in a week.  I imagine there is a late night dinner or drinks session starting at 1:05am ET after the show ends every week.

So, ‘that song’ has been in my damn head forever and I finally decided to figure out if it was a ‘real’ song or just something they put together for the show.  It turns out it is, in fact, a real song composed by Howard Shore all the way back at the start of the show.  It also turns out Howard played in some early SNL episodes then went on to compose the scores for The Lord of the Rings film trilogy which he won three Academy Awards for, go figure.

Anyway, the song is titled, as best as I can tell anyway: “Saturday Night Live Closing Theme Song (A Waltz in A)”.  There are plenty of clips on YouTube of the end of the show where you can hear the song played, but I ran across a musician named Ben Schwartz who did an entire rendition of it via a keyboard / PC synth setup.  It is great and I’m secretly planning to play it in the Uber office on an endless loop the day we go public!

So, with that lengthy introduction (see, I told you I don’t care what you think about it), I leave you with the music…