You know that SNL skit... the one about more cowbell? Well, just the other day, I was searching the iTunes Store for Kabelo and it made me think of Kowbello, which made me think of cowbell.com, which made me think of... eventually, I got around to thinking of that skit and thought, “What better way to end this train of thought than to search iTunes for the skit, download it and listen again and again!”

When I entered the phrase “more cowbell” into iTunes I got 103 hits! I quickly scanned through the list and, much to my chagrin, none of these were the skit! Oh, I double-clicked on a few just to see what they were (I was mildly surprised that I knew a good many of them), but no video link.

As I looked over the list... crestfallen... I started to notice that none of these songs had “more” or “cowbell” in their names. Songs like

Suzie Q,

Lay, Lady, Lay

Can’t Get Enough of Your Love

Mixed Bizness

Darlington County

Stuck in the Middle with You

and much, much mo...

sorry, was in a K-Tel moment

It just didn’t make any sense. I started playing the songs I didn’t know to see if I could determine if they were grouped in SOME recognizable way. That’s when I realized that each song had cowbell.

At first, I couldn’t believe it. (I even typed “more cymbal” to see if iTunes now referenced instruments!) It was simply too giggle-tastic for the real world. I did the search again and came up with the same 103 songs and they were songs I either knew had cowbell or you could hear the cowbell in the 30 second snippet. Thinking this was simply one of those everyone-knows-it-but-me things, I dashed off a quick query through Google and that’s where I found the Complete More Cowbell collection. That dashed my thoughts of an impish renegade iTunes database manager meddling with the metadata, but still, that only accounted for 75 of the 103 songs in the search results.

Further mathematical musical manipulation showed that of the 103, 18 of them either had cowbell in the song title or were duplicates of the same artist from separate albums... soooo, serendipitous, but not likely surreptitious.