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Views from the Riverside

Rob Ford
Riverside Title

My youngest son plays the bass guitar on a professional level. A few years ago, he was hired as part of a small ensemble to play the late comedienne Joan Rivers on and off the stage at one of northern Michigan’s finest casinos. For two nights he actually got paid to play thirty seconds of the “Colonel Bogey March” as Rivers entered the stage and thirty seconds of “Anchors Aweigh” as she exited off. Joan Rivers, rest her soul, will be remembered by many people for many things, but for me, she will be forever linked to those two songs.

All kinds of entertainers and important people have theme songs. The President of the United States has one, the Tonight Show has one, Bonanza had perhaps the best one of all time.
Every current professional baseball player has what is referred to as “walk up” music. Ten seconds of popular music that they feel either represents them, inspires them or somehow announces them to the crowd. One that comes to mind was Hall of Fame relief pitcher, Trevor Hoffman, who always took the mound to Metallica’s power ballad; Enter Sandman.

In our industry, theme songs and walk up music don’t really have a place. We all get the occasional songs stuck in our head and stroll down the corridors of our offices humming them for hours but I just can’t picture the doors opening here at the corner of Bridge and Chippewa streets in downtown Elk Rapids to the same theme song every morning.

But if you are looking to liven up your office with a theme song, or if you’ve been asked to give a presentation at the next MLTA educational seminar on the finer points of the grantor/grantee title examination process, a theme song does exist, believe it or not

That’s right, there is a song written and produced by one of the biggest acts in the history of popular music that every title examiner and closing processor should adopt as their theme song.
I’m talking about a song by the band U2 that was released in 1987 on their top selling Joshua Tree album and the song is titled “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” In 1987, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” was nominated for song of the year and record of the year. Since then, it has been ranked as high as #93 in the 500 Greatest Rock and Roll Songs of all Time.

If you can’t think of it off the top of your head… go look it up. Its strong instrumental introduction is a genius hook of a single note groove. As unrelenting as it is unforgiving, you can practically picture guitarist, “The Edge”, putting together a Closing Disclosure with dogged determination. With its title industry specific lyrical perfection, you would have thought that Bono himself was that frustrated title examiner standing in a cramped courthouse vault at a quarter after four in the afternoon keeping a bothersome realtor at bay as the words poured out of his soul into his chain of title.

It probably would never rise to the iconic level of the Bonanza theme song, rollick like the Jefferson’s theme song or even grab attention like the NBC Nightly News theme song, but “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” has been around practically my entire title examining career and now, I think it’s time to make it the Title Examiner theme song.