Happy

Happy, it's a toe-tapping, smile-inducing, can't-possibly-be-down-once-it's-on kind of tune and I can't stop playing it. The video? Even better.

I remembered reading a story in The New York Times about how Pharrell Williams, the hit maker, producer and singer, was struggling to make a light-hearted but pivotal song for the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack. According to the story, he wrote and rejected nine songs and felt "backed in a corner" until he finally wrote a song he said captured what 'happy' felt like.

Then he and his team created two videos, a four-minute version and "24 Hours of Happy," with celebrities and regular folk dancing through the streets of Los Angeles and in a bowling alley, a rooftop, in a church, and a high school hallway in real time over a whole day. Old, young, balletic, goofy, they let the song just carry them, along sidewalks and side streets, making me wish this was the way the whole world moved on, say, a Thursday in February.

Williams dances all over the video, in his charming Canadian Mounty-like hat, and he sings, "Clap along if you feel that
happiness is the truth."

With this song playing, it is.

http://youtu.be/y6Sxv-sUYtM

(www.nytimes.com/2013/12/26/arts/music/round-the-clock-giddiness-in-a-24-hour-music-vid)