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The Hit
If you didn’t know “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” before you saw Guardians of the Galaxy 2, you knew it before the final credits rolled, if only because you heard it twice by then. The guy who wrote the song, Elliot Lurie, liked how the song fit both times and, while I thought I read somewhere that Kurt Russell (who starred in the movie as Ego) called it the best song ever, it was his character (again, Ego) who made that call. Still, that’s high praise from a god. Or a planet. Or whatever.
That said, Lurie mentioned one particular thing he appreciated to the Hollywood Reporter:
“It was a story song, and the band I was with, Looking Glass, we were hoping and praying for a hit record that people would play in their convertibles with the tops down.”
The way James Gunn (right?) used the song doesn’t stray so far from the original story/intent of it. Lurie borrowed the name of a high school sweetheart named Randye when he started writing it, but he thought the name too gender-neutral for a lyric. Once the inspiration hit to make it a song about a barmaid who poured drinks for and captured the hearts of lonely sailors, “Brandy” struck him as a natural fit. And, just like in the movie, it’s a tale of heartbreak:
“’Brandy,’ as Lurie noted, was basically the tale of a barmaid in a busy seaport town. As in so many songs before and since, she longs for her true love, but for him, nothing could match the lure of the wide-open sea."
A couple of tales attach to “Brandy,” one true - the timing of its release forced Barry Manilow to change the name of a famous hit to “Mandy” - the other, the one about a “spinster” named Mary Ellis, not true. A New Jersey legend claims that, at the end of “a very hot romance,” a sailor promised Mary Ellis that he’d come back to marry her. Her never returned, of course, and poor Mary left nothing behind but the tombstone with her name on it. Lurie knew nothing about that legend when he wrote the song at the age of 20 and, as he explained to The Tennessean in 2016, he had a pretty simple songwriting process of playing some chords and free associating from there.
If you didn’t know “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” before you saw Guardians of the Galaxy 2, you knew it before the final credits rolled, if only because you heard it twice by then. The guy who wrote the song, Elliot Lurie, liked how the song fit both times and, while I thought I read somewhere that Kurt Russell (who starred in the movie as Ego) called it the best song ever, it was his character (again, Ego) who made that call. Still, that’s high praise from a god. Or a planet. Or whatever.
That said, Lurie mentioned one particular thing he appreciated to the Hollywood Reporter:
“It was a story song, and the band I was with, Looking Glass, we were hoping and praying for a hit record that people would play in their convertibles with the tops down.”
The way James Gunn (right?) used the song doesn’t stray so far from the original story/intent of it. Lurie borrowed the name of a high school sweetheart named Randye when he started writing it, but he thought the name too gender-neutral for a lyric. Once the inspiration hit to make it a song about a barmaid who poured drinks for and captured the hearts of lonely sailors, “Brandy” struck him as a natural fit. And, just like in the movie, it’s a tale of heartbreak:
“’Brandy,’ as Lurie noted, was basically the tale of a barmaid in a busy seaport town. As in so many songs before and since, she longs for her true love, but for him, nothing could match the lure of the wide-open sea."
A couple of tales attach to “Brandy,” one true - the timing of its release forced Barry Manilow to change the name of a famous hit to “Mandy” - the other, the one about a “spinster” named Mary Ellis, not true. A New Jersey legend claims that, at the end of “a very hot romance,” a sailor promised Mary Ellis that he’d come back to marry her. Her never returned, of course, and poor Mary left nothing behind but the tombstone with her name on it. Lurie knew nothing about that legend when he wrote the song at the age of 20 and, as he explained to The Tennessean in 2016, he had a pretty simple songwriting process of playing some chords and free associating from there.
