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Turn around, bright eyes: Here's your total eclipse playlist

Bonnie Tyler will be belting out her 1983 hit on a cruise ship on eclipse day, but here are some other sonic suggestions for the big event.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Gael Cooper
2 min read
eclipsecruise

Yeah, most of us can't make it on the eclipse-day cruise where Bonnie Tyler will be performing "Total Eclipse of the Heart," so here's a playlist instead.

Royal Caribbean

It was as inevitable as the sunrise and the 1980s musical revival: Bonnie Tyler's 1983 hit, "Total Eclipse of the Heart," just had to find its way into the news surrounding Monday's total solar eclipse.

Tyler will be joining "Cake by the Ocean" band DNCE on the Royal Caribbean cruise ship Oasis of the Seas, and will duet with the band on her hit song an hour before the eclipse, the cruise line announced Wednesday. 

The concert is part of a special week-long eclipse-themed cruise that will position itself along the eclipse's path of totality for the big event (and let's hope they're serving some seriously good cake to tie in to DNCE's big hit as well).

If you can't get Tyler's song out of your brain, embed it still further by watching this hilarious literal video, which fills out the tune with words describing what's going on in the tune's delightfully bizarre music video, to hilarious results. Best line is either "It started out as Hogwarts, now it's Lord of the Flies," or "Arthur Fonzarelli's got an army of clones." (You'll get it once you watch.)

Tyler's song has to make most eclipse-related musical playlists for its title alone. But we wanted to create an entire roundup of tunes to play, whether or not you're making pinhole viewers out of pizza boxes and racing to the path of totality.

Not every song with "moon" or "sun" in the title can qualify -- and order is important. This list travels along with the eclipse, starting with the Smiths' defiant "There is a Light that Never Goes Out" through Len's mischievous "Steal My Sunshine," and smack into the grim darkness of Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun." 

But things get bright again at the end, with the Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun" and Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine" welcoming back the normal order of things. In Tyler's wise words, forever's gonna start tonight (or, well. Monday).

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