#18, “The Rainbow Connection,” Kermit the Frog (1979)

150 Favorite Songs: #18, “The Rainbow Connection,” Kermit the Frog (1979)

When you’re young, anything that happened before you were born feels like ancient history. It’s wild to me, thinking about how perspective works, that the moon landing happened a little more than a decade before I was born, because for a lot of my life, it seemed as distant to me as World War II, which seemed roughly as distant to me as, I don’t know, the invention of cars. File it all under: stuff that’s just always been there.

As you get older, of course, you gain perspective. Eleven years starts to sound like a pretty short amount of time. The moon landing is as far from when I was born as, I don’t know, Frozen or Yeezus is from now, and I still think of Yeezus as recent Kanye. It’s no time at all. Then you start to think about things that feel like a part of active, recent, living history—September 11th, or Hurricane Katrina, say—and realize that for a person who is eighteen years old right now, those things probably feel like the moon landing or the Vietnam War did to me, like things that happened in the distant past. And if you’re in your seventies, maybe 9/11 and the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the assassination of John Lennon and the capture of Saigon and the moon landing all feel like they happened not that long ago, either.

That’s a lot of reflection for a post that is ostensibly about a song sung by a Muppet, but bear with me.

The thing is, “The Rainbow Connection” was written not too long before I was born. To my ears, it sounds like a standard. But I don’t think that’s strictly a matter of perspective. I think it’s because “The Rainbow Connection” sounds like a song out of time.

Here’s the story of “The Rainbow Connection”: When making The Muppet Movie, Jim Henson collaborated on the music for the movie with Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher, two songwriters who’d collaborated on the soundtrack to A Star Is Born (the Kris Kristofferson/Barbra Streisand version). Henson told them that the movie should open with Kermit the Frog sitting alone in the swamp, playing the banjo and singing something to himself. They came up with a pretty vocal melody and a memorable verse, and then needed a line to transition from the verse to the chorus, which they knew would end with that “the lovers, the dreamers, and me” hook—something to connect the part about rainbows to the part about dreamers. At some point during a break, they explained the problem they were having to Williams’s wife, explaining that the song needed a “rainbow connection” to the chorus, and she was like…. “Duh?” and thus the spell was completed and “The Rainbow Connection” was conjured into the world.

But it is incredible, listening to it now, at least as someone who has never drawn breath in a world where “The Rainbow Connection” didn’t exist, to think about how mundane, and recent, its origins are. Two guys got hired to write some songs for a frog puppet to sing in a movie. They got stuck at one part, ate dinner with their wives, and figured it out. They went on and wrote the next song. It just sounds to me like something that’s always been there, or at least has been there for as long as people were singing three-minute songs with verses and choruses and bridges. You could tell me that “When You Wish Upon a Star,” “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and “The Rainbow Connection” were the first three pop songs ever written, and I would say that sounds about right.

There’s so much about “The Rainbow Connection” that makes it sound timeless, whether it’s being sung by Kermit the Frog or by, say, Willie Nelson or Johnny Mathis or Judy Collins or the Carpenters, or, I dunno, Weezer. It’s wistful and yearning, and it manages to express those things in language that’s both plainspoken and familiar and also metaphorical and abstract. It contains a wisdom that feels true and important and earned; that contradicts a received belief for something more insightful; that considers the questions more important than the answers; that speaks to identities we all have, as lovers and dreamers and, ultimately, as just ourselves. It does all of this wrapped in a melody that’s simultaneously simple and beautiful, that anybody can sing—someone with a voice as lovely as Sarah McLachlan or Christina Perri can make it soar, or someone as atonal as Rivers Cuomo can sing it with his whole heart. It was, after all, a song written for a frog puppet to sing. (A fun anecdote: When recording the song, Jim Henson struggled to capture the spirit the song was going for, and eventually he brought out the Kermit puppet to have him do a take; this is the one you’re familiar with.)

And I think that’s the other thing I love about “The Rainbow Connection.” It’s a perfect song, maybe the most recent song to fully count as a true standard, and the people who wrote it gave it to Kermit the Frog to sing first. There’s a lack of pretense to “The Rainbow Connection” that makes it feel not just lovely but also pure, something less like a pop song and more like a lullaby. They could have handed Jim Henson something else, and given “The Rainbow Connection” to whatever pop singer might have climbed the charts in the summer of 1979 with it. It would have made sense as a Barbra Streisand song (and she did eventually release a recording of it, in 2021, as a duet with Kermit!) (It’s lovely, especially the way she sings the third verse). The song is so good that even the Kermit the Frog version peaked at #25 on the Hot 100, despite the silliness of America falling in love with a song performed by a frog puppet. (The Academy Awards were embarrassed to give an Oscar to The Muppet Movie, so the song “It Goes Like It Goes,” a turgid, forgettable ballad, won instead.)

It’s easy to imagine that Williams and Ascher might have been too precious about this tossed-off masterpiece to give this song to The Muppet Movie, but they didn’t, and it became timeless as a result. “The Rainbow Connection” is something that really and truly belongs to everyone—the lovers, the dreamers, and me, indeed.