Escape (The Piña Colada Song) (Guardians of the Galaxy)

A man places a personal ad in a newspaper looking for someone adventurous enough to escape his stale relationship. The woman who responds turns out to be his wife. The story is almost too neat, too resolved, but Rupert Holmes tells it with such affable pleasure that you forgive its tidiness completely. His voice is warm and slightly reedy, the voice of a man who spins a good yarn over drinks, and the production around it is archetypal 1979 soft rock — bright electric piano, horns that arrive at the chorus with cheerful inevitability, a tempo that strolls without rushing. The song is fundamentally comic in register, even as it touches on dissatisfaction and the near-betrayal of adultery, because Holmes keeps the whole enterprise light, focused on the happy accident rather than the moral complexity. It became the last number-one song of the 1970s, which feels right: it is thoroughly of that decade's particular brand of uncomplicated pleasure-seeking, the same cultural moment that invented hot tubs and leisure suits and believed that lifestyle was a perfectly serious subject for art. Used in Guardians, it underscores the same kind of accidental-belonging theme the films return to repeatedly: people finding their people by stumbling rather than searching. Reach for this on a Friday afternoon when the week is finished and the evening hasn't decided what it is yet.