Welcome to THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English. I'm Steve Ember, and today we bring you music for the New Year.

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New Year's is a holiday for memories and for hopes. The past and the future come together at midnight. Not surprisingly, emotions are as much a part of New Year's Eve as noisemakers and fireworks. After all, a traditional way to welcome the New Year is to kiss the person you love.

"Old Lang Syne" lends its name to a modern song about a man and a woman who once were lovers. One day, a week before New Year's, they meet again by chance. The singer is Dan Fogelberg and the song is called "Same Old Lang Syne."

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On December sixteenth, two thousand seven, fans of Dan Fogelberg lost an old friend. The American singer and songwriter died of prostate cancer at the age of fifty-six.
He was known for the kind of soft rock popular in the nineteen seventies and eighties. "Same Old Lang Syne" was one of the hits from his nineteen eighty-one album "The Innocent Age."

The idea of meeting an old lover by chance is also at the heart of a Paul Simon song. Here is the title song from Paul Simon's nineteen seventy-five album "Still Crazy After All These Years."

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Chance meetings are one of life's little surprises. They can happen anywhere -- in a market, on the street, even in a taxicab. This song by Harry Chapin is called "Taxi."

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Harry Chapin was a popular folk singer and songwriter. In nineteen eighty-one, at the age of thirty-eight, he died in a car crash on his way to a performance.