Looking Glass – Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl)

“Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” -Single by Looking Glass
from the album Looking Glass
B-side “One by One”
Released 1972
Label Epic
Songwriter Elliot Lurie
Producers Mike Gershman, Bob Liftin and the Looking Glass.
Charted No.1 in US; No.1 in Canada; No.5 in New Zealand

The four members of Looking Glass are alumni of Rutgers University, and the Spring 2009 Rutgers alumni magazine carried an article about this song and the band itself. The pertinent part reads:

“The band recorded the song seven times before they got it right. ‘Brandy’ – based on the name of (lead singer) Elliot Lurie’s high school sweetheart ‘Randy’ – tells the story of a musician torn between his love for a life at sea and his love for a barmaid. Released as the B-side of ‘Don’t It Make You Feel Good,’ the song was overlooked, as was the A-side, for that matter, until Harv Moore, a Washington DC disc jockey took it up as a personal cause. After years of playing covers and their originals at frat parties and bars in the New Brunswick area, Looking Glass was signed to Epic Records by the legendary Clive Davis.

The lyrics tell of Brandy, a barmaid in a busy seaport harbor town which serves “a hundred ships a day.” Though lonely sailors flirt with her, she pines for one who has long since left her because he claimed his life, his love, and his lady, was “the sea.”

Following the song’s release in 1972, “Brandy” increased in popularity as a girl’s name in the United States. According to data from the Social Security Administration, Brandy was the 353rd most popular name in 1971, 140th in 1972, and, in 1973 (the first full year after the song’s popularity), 82nd.