Here’s How One ‘Family Guy’ Episode Revived Interest in This Canadian Music Legend
Thanks to Seth MacFarlane and Family Guy’s appreciation for adult contemporary music from the 1970s, Nova Scotian singer Anne Murray found a new audience with members of Stewie’s generation.
The relationship between Family Guy and the music world has always been a close one that excites and confuses fans of both the show and of Conway Twitty alike. MacFarlane’s entire oeuvre is inextricably tied to his background as a trained and talented crooner, and his appreciation for the popular music of generations past that has since fallen out of fashion with the Family Guy demographic has long encouraged younger viewers and listeners to develop an appreciation for classic showtunes, Frank Sinatra Jr. and, of course, Murray, whose appearance as herself in the 2013 Family Guy episode “Chris Cross” sparked a resurgence of youthful interest in early Canadian pop music.
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This past Sunday, Murray, 79, accepted a lifetime achievement award at the Juno Awards from the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. But before the Great White North celebrated the way-paving career of the “You Needed Me,” singer, music journalist Tony Le Calvez explained how MacFarlane’s “love letter” to the Canadian legend led to an all-time high for interest in Murray's music during the internet era as young Family Guy fans from across the web united in asking Google, “Who is this enchantress?”
In his Paste article titled, “Who Is This Enchantress? Seth MacFarlane’s Love Letter to Anne Murray,” Le Calvez recalled his experience of watching “Chris Cross” during the episode’s premiere and finding himself similarly smitten with Murray’s music as were Stewie and Brian in the B-plot. In the Family Guy episode, Lois exposes her youngest son to Murray’s 1979 cover of the Carpenters song “I Just Fall in Love Again,” sparking an obsession that culminates in Stewie and Brian crashing Murray’s house before Stewie holds the singer at gunpoint upon learning that Murray wasn’t the songwriter of her hit single “Snowbird.”
Le Calvez pointed out how, immediately following the first airing of “Chris Cross,” Google searches for Anne Murray hit an all-time high, noting that the support of Family Guy fans has punctuated the singer’s online presence ever since. “If you check the comments of any of Murray’s greatest hits on YouTube, the section is full of praise from Family Guy fans who have fallen in love with Murray’s music,” Le Calvez wrote before rattling off a number of reviews from Family Guy fans whose love affair with Murray’s music also started in that car ride with Lois.
“While it’s easy to argue that Family Guy is the Del Taco of television, in this instance I find myself defending the show because of Anne, because it turned a new generation onto her music,” Le Calvez cracked of MacFarlane’s habit of both ripping off The Simpsons and highlighting the talents of musicians from years past whose melodies may not have reached the Millennial-and-younger generations without him.
As Le Calvez noted, shortly after “Chris Cross” began the Family Guy fandom’s Murray Mania, MacFarlane tweeted about the episode’s origins, explaining, “In answer to you all: my dad always played Anne Murray in the car on the way to the dump when I was a kid. Inspiration for the episode.”
Today, Murray enjoys 1.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify despite the fact that her heyday predated music streaming by a couple of decades. While we have no way of knowing how much of that figure is due to Family Guy, Le Calvez knows that at least one Canadian soft rock die-hard owes his Anne Murray fandom to MacFarlane and the psychedelic power of the rainbow Stewies.
