After I wrote (Technicalities, April) that BR in the metars stands for brume, which is French for mist or fog, a reader, Bob Bartch, with whom I was exchanging e-mails on another topic, commented that he had learned that word from a lyric by an American-French singer, Joe Dassin, who covered Gordon Lightfoot’s profoundly morose 1965 “In the Early Morning Rain” under the title “Dans la brume du matin” (the sadness of French mist being roughly equal to that of American rain). This got me thinking about another great airport song, Elton John’s Daniel, in which a younger brother watches the departure of an older who has apparently been blinded by accident or war, and who is now flying away to live in Spain. (It always bothers me that the song gets the color of the tail light wrong, but it’s touching nonetheless.)
Elton John’s singer is in the departure lounge, whereas Lightfoot’s and Dassin’s alcoholic drifters seem to be loitering outside the airport fence. (Today, they would probably be detained on suspicion of terroristic intentions.) And whereas the emotion of John’s lyric centers upon the departing brother, that of Lightfoot’s concerns the airplane itself, its independence and freedom, its allegiance to heaven rather than earth. Listen for the truth in this (while trying to ignore the painful clunkers about mighty engines and silver birds):
