The 2024 Walmart holiday commercial with the Gilmore Girls cast has a lovely song in the background: let’s discover it.
The holiday season is the perfect moment to bring back emotional memories, and the advertising world knows it very well. Look at what Walmart did a few weeks before Christmas: a tender, pleasant commercial featuring the Gilmore Girls cast, with the snow on the streets, Luke and Lorelai again together, and a classic ballad in the background. Everything is carefully conceived to bring tears to our eyes, and the Internet’s first reactions immediately confirmed it.
You can watch the 2024 Walmart holiday commercial featuring Gilmore Girls below.
While all those emotions came back, so many years after the last episode aired in 2007, another curiosity emerged: what’s that song in the background? It’s a classic tune many recognized, and it’s worth (re)discovering it today. The song featured in the 2024 Walmart “Gilmore Girls” commercial is How to Dream by Sam Phillips. You can listen to it in full streaming below.
For those who don’t know her, Sam Phillips is a talented American singer/songwriter who’s been writing music since the early 80s. Known for her poetic and introspective songwriting, she started with Christian music and then moved into mainstream right before the 90s. She is one of the authors who contributed to the Gilmore Girls official soundtrack and the voice who sings that famous “la-la” we often hear in the TV show.
How to Dream is part of her 2001 album Fan Dance and also belongs to the show’s soundtrack. The song is characterized by its minimalist instrumentation, mixed with Phillips’ soft, emotive vocals. It reflects themes of longing, hope, and personal reflection, common in Phillips’ work.
Under normal, we change the wind
Facing every direction
Planted in the future, we live two lives
All to reveal a secret we can’t hide
Ah, ah, ah-ah-ah-ah, ah-ah
When we open our eyes and dream
We open our eyes
The song exemplifies Phillips’ signature style, with those stripped-down arrangements and that usual, intimate atmosphere. It features acoustic instrumentation, with gentle guitar work complementing her understated vocals. The simplicity allows the emotional weight of the lyrics to shine, and it easily brings into your mind the unique way Gilmore Girls had to melt our hearts.
So Walmart did it again: the holiday season has come, and the new commercial has already made everyone cry, with a simple combination that mixes a TV show that many loved and a song that recreates that well-known atmosphere. We didn’t need anything else.
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