"Somewhere" Song

On the other side of the moon
Ever so far, beyond the last little star,
There's a land, I know,
Where the good songs go,
Where it's always afternoon,
And snug in a haven of peace and rest
Lie the dear old songs that we love the best.

—"The Land Where The Good Songs Go" (by Jerome Kern and P. G. Wodehouse)

A song about an idealized, far-off place, real, imaginary or merely notional, often at a specific time. Often, the title will include the words "Somewhere" or "Out/Up/Over There".

Subtrope of Location Song. Often an "I Want" Song. If the "somewhere" in question is just anywhere that isn't home, it's a Wanderlust Song. Compare "Setting Off" Song, "Leaving the Nest" Song.

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Examples:

Films — Animation

• "In A World Of My Own" from Alice in Wonderland.
• "Somewhere Out There" and "There Are No Cats In America", both from An American Tail.
  • The sequel, An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, has "Way Out West".
• "Beyond These Walls" from Arlo the Alligator Boy.
• "City Of Light" from The Brave Little Toaster.
• "Go the Distance" from Hercules.
• "Out There" from The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
• "That's The Life For Me" James and the Giant Peach.
• "Upendi" from The Lion King II: Simba's Pride.
• The Little Mermaid features both a straight example — Ariel's "Part of Your World" — and an inversion — Sebastian's "Under the Sea", in which he tries to persuade Ariel to stay.
• "The Second Star to the Right" from Peter Pan.
• "Just Around the Riverbend" from Pocahontas.
• "Up There" from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, in which Satan sings that he wants to be somewhere sweeter.
• "When Will My Life Begin?" from Tangled.

Films — Live-Action

• Trope Codifier: "(Somewhere) Over The Rainbow" from The Wizard of Oz.
• "Somewhere" from West Side Story (1961).
• "White Christmas" from Holiday Inn.
• "Beyond the Blue Horizon" from Monte Carlo.
• "Santa Fe" from Newsies.
• "Something Better" from Muppet Treasure Island.

Live-Action TV

• The UK theme song to the 1965 Yugoslavian/German series The White Horses mentions a gentle wonderland "stars away" where the clouds are made of candy floss.

Music

• "Beyond the Sea", most famously performed by Bobby Darin and later by Michael Bublé
• The old folk song "(Big) Rock Candy Mountain"
• "Virginia" by Jeremy Messersmith
• "Youkali" by Kurt Weill
• In A Very Potter Musical, Draco starts to sing a song about Pigfarts, but is cut off by Voldemort.
• "Fantasia" by Stratovarius.
• "Octopus's Garden" from Abbey Road and "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" from Magical Mystery Tour by The Beatles.
• "Let's Get Lost" by Amanda Marshall. Specifically, she's depressed by the cold dark winter and wants to be somewhere warm near the ocean.
• "The Mountains and Marian" by Gordon Lightfoot.
• "Castles in the Air" by Don McLean.
• "Song Of The Land" by Susan Aglukark. She hopes to someday live in a place with beautiful scenery where everyone lives in harmony.
• Many Negro spirituals are this. Songs with lyrics about escaping from captivity (like "Jacob's Ladder") and reaching heaven are really about the desire to escape from slavery and live in freedom somewhere.
• Tom Waits covered the West Side Story (1961) "Somewhere" on his album Blue Valentine.
  • Barbra Streisand covered the song as well - her version is heard at the very beginning of The Earth Day Special.
  • In the Rugrats Whole-Plot Reference episode "Wash/Dry Story", "Somewhere" is parodied as "Someplace".
• Also by Tom Waits is "Chicago" (from the album Bad As Me), a more guarded version of this trope, as the narrator isn't entirely confident that Chicago will be any better than the unspecified place where he and his family currently are.
  • "Goin' Out West" (off of Bone Machine) is both this and an "I Am" Song, with the extremely macho narrator bragging about just how much they're going to love him when he gets to Hollywood.
  • "Whistle Down The Wind" (also on Bone Machine) is this trope from the perspective of someone who is too terrified to make that actual leap out of his comfortable life, but also can't bear to just let life pass him by.
• "Free to Be... You and Me" by The New Seekers, from the children's album and TV special of the same name.
• "Land of Make Believe" by Chuck Mangione (vocal by Esther Satterfield).
• "Chilling at the Motel 6" from A Slenderman Musical. In this, Timothy and Zoe both sing about the safe, ordinary life they had once lived, which now seems like a far away, golden dream, ephemeral and unattainable.
• "In the Hills of Tennessee" by Jimmie Rodgers which features the singer claiming he will find his paradise lost and seventh heaven at a cabin within the hills of Tennessee.
• "Downtown" by Petula Clark was inspired by songwriter Tony Hatch's first ever visit to New York in 1964, though there are no explicit references to the city itself.
• "Rainbow Valley" by Love Affair.
• "New York, New York" by Kander and Ebb, famously sung by Liza Minnelli.
• "When We Get There" by Paul Anka.
• Patience and Prudence's "The Money Tree" is about the town of Greenback, where nobody has to work and everybody's driving next year's Cadillacs.
• "Cowtown" by They Might Be Giants, which is probably an homage to the above "Octopus's Garden".
• Pointedly defied in Queen's "Who Wants To Live Forever?"
  There's no time for us
  There's no place for us
• "God Out West" by Link Wray
• 'Twilight Cafe' by Susan Fassbender

Theatre

• "Bali Ha'i" from South Pacific.
• "How Are Things In Glocca Morra?" from Finian's Rainbow.
• "Somewhere" from West Side Story.
• "Castle On A Cloud", " In My Life " and "Do You Hear The People Sing?" from Les Misérables.
• "Normandy" from Once Upon a Mattress.
• "Santa Fe" from RENT
  • And "Santa Fe" from Newsies, which is also this trope. The two songs are (somehow) otherwise unrelated.
• "New Holy Land" from Cesare - Il Creatore che ha distrutto is a subversion — after the confrontation between the French and Spanish students, where the French students attacked Miguel because he's Jewish, Miguel sings about the explorers currently (1491) traveling the world to find a place with a freedom they can't have in Europe, but he tells Angelo that a better world isn't something you find, it's something you have to create.
• "Solla Sollew" from Seussical The Musical.
• "Somewhere That's Green" from Little Shop of Horrors
• "Never Never Land" from Peter Pan.
• "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" from Hello, Dolly! (about New York).
• "Sal Tlay Ka Siti" from The Book of Mormon is a deconstruction, where Nabulungi imagines a "paradise on earth" that bears no relation to the real place she's singing about. We, the audience, know better.
• "There's a World" from Next to Normal. In context, it's Played for Drama, because the character singing is referring to the afterlife.
• "Let's Fly Away" from the Cole Porter musical The New Yorkers.
• "My Soul is Madly Tired" from the Russian rock opera Juno and Avos.
• "Her Voice" and "Beyond My Wildest Dreams" from the stage adaptation of The Little Mermaid.
• The title song and "The Grass is Greener" from Michael & Jill Gallina's Freedom Bound (not to be confused with the Mad River Theatre Works musical of the same name).
• "A Million Miles Away" from the stage version of Aladdin.
• "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top" from Oklahoma!.

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