"If There Is Something" is a song written by Bryan Ferry and recorded by Roxy Music for their eponymous debut album. A live version appears on their Viva! live album.
The song begins in a rather light-hearted, jaunty fashion, a slight pastiche of country music, with honky tonk style piano and twangy guitar. Ferry's singing is nonchalant and jocular.
However the mood of the song builds with a repeated instrumental motif played between guitar and saxophone, Ferry's vocals re-entering to provide a fraught vocal climax.
The instrumental motifs then return, finally giving way to an emotional end section where Ferry's impassioned and melancholy vocals are set on top of a lush blend of backing vocals and the mellotron "three violins" tape set.
It has been said that the first part of the song is a youth wondering about love, the second part adults in the heat of passion and the third part the singer in old age thinking about their past love.
The song appears in the 2008 film Flashbacks of a Fool starring Daniel Craig where it features centrally in a scene where the main protagonist's younger self dances to the song with his girlfriend while made up as Bryan Ferry.
Read more about If There Is Something: Live Performances, Cover Versions
Famous quotes containing the words there and/or something:
“There is no there there.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“It is the light
At the end of the tunnel as it might be seen
By him looking out somberly at the shower,
The picture of hope a dying man might turn away from,
Realizing that hope is something else, something concrete
You can’t have.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)