Dee dee dah Dum

All right, you've got a song stuck in your head, da da deedah DEE-dah deedah DEE-dah the bumpy road to love. It goes around and around, all day long, driving you nuts. You know it's part of a song, and if you could remember the other part of the song you could remember it all. But you're stuck with this little fragment playing over and over. And the only words you can come up with are "the bumpy road." You know if you can't solve this soon, they're going to be locking you up in the padded room and take away your belt.

Cheer up, help may be on the way. Check out The International Lyrics Server, currently home to lyrics from 93,408 songs. Located in Switzerland, their database allows searching by artist, album, or song title. Searching by artist's name brings up a list of albums with their songs listed. Say you input "Rodgers and Hammerstein." The search results will show several albums (Cinderella, Oklahoma) and some "non-album tracks" (oddly enough two from Carousel, one from South Pacific, and - oddly enough - one from Oklahoma). To the right of the album names come the list of songs ("A Lovely Night" through "The Sweetest Sounds" - hmmm, must be the recent Disney TV version). Clicking on the song title brings you to a page with the lyrics.

From the same search page you can input album or song titles. There's also a page for "approximative" searching, good for when you don't know the exact spelling. And like the regular search page, here you can search by artist, album, or song title. Typing in "Bali" under title brings results like "Da Da Dali," "Ali Està O Rio," "Bald Headed Woman," and "Ball and Chain" (but not "Bali Ha'i"). And the ILS is truly an international database: a search for "zum" turns up everything from Peter Gabriel's "Mundzumundbeatmung" to Jbo's "Ein Guter Tag Zum Sterben" to "Halls of Montezuma."

You can browse an alphabetical list of artists - clicking the artist's name once again brings up a list of albums and associated songs. But best of all is the "full-text" search for when you remember part of a lyric but not the whole song. Type in a few of the words you remember and - if it's in the database - you'll be dished up a complete set of lyrics. "Isn't it rich" turns up "Send in the Clowns" as sung by Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, but not from the cast album of A Little Night Music or as sung by Judy Collins (who I believe was the first pop artist to cover the song). Which brings us to the ILS's

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