‘Darling Be Home Soon’: How Francis Ford Coppola gave rise to one of the 1960s’ most unique love songs
Having your song used in the soundtrack for a famous film is hardly something you’re going to turn down, especially when a name as esteemed as Francis Ford Coppola is the director responsible for the movie.
The Lovin’ Spoonful were a band who had enjoyed reasonable success during the middle of the 1960s, and had established themselves as one of America’s most formidable pop acts during a time where British dominance in this area was something the US struggled to contain. However, there were a number of occasions during the period where the stability of the group appeared to be precarious, and there were signs that they perhaps couldn’t survive long enough to remain competitive in the contemporary musical climate.
The group were at their most successful when frontman and lead vocalist John Sebastian was in charge of the songwriting, and it’s no surprise that their biggest hits were all tracks that he had provided. It was largely because of this that he was the one recruited by Coppola to write the soundtrack for his then-upcoming 1966 film, You’re A Big Boy Now, even though it would end up being credited to The Lovin’ Spoonful as a whole, with the band appearing on a number of cuts from the score.
A coming-of-age film about a young man in pursuit of love in the sprawl of New York City, the soundtrack that Sebastian produced was far from his greatest work, but did feature one of his most unusual compositions, not for how it sounded, but for how it flipped common tropes of a love song on its head.
While the protagonist of Coppola’s film was an awkward character who is struggling to hold down a relationship due to his inexperience, the song ‘Darling Be Home Soon’ was requested for a love scene, and sees Sebastian take the normal concept of an artist on the road who longs to be back home and reunited with his beloved, and reverse the roles, having the male voice plead with his girlfriend for her to return to him.
Sebastian would later explain his reasoning for changing the dynamic of this tried and tested formula in an interview with Marc Myers for his book, Anatomy of a Song. “From the singer’s perspective, the verses are pleas for a partner to spend a few minutes talking before leaving,” he remarked, adding, “What made the song interesting is that you never knew if the other person was actually there listening or was already gone.”
As fascinating as this role reversal is, the song itself wasn’t exactly the best-performing track that The Lovin’ Spoonful had released, with it only managing to achieve a high of number 15 in the US charts. At the same time, the film was largely overlooked as well, save for an Oscar nomination for Geraldine Page in the role of the protagonist’s mother, but in asking Sebastian to provide the score, Coppola arguably helped birth one of the strangest love songs of the 1960s, even if it didn’t end up providing him with a hit at the box office.
