Time and technology make an awkward pair.

When our closest possessions are obsolete in weeks, and gratification of nearly every human need can occur within seconds, words like “timeless” and “treasured” don’t have the same luster. When you lose someone close to you, technology and time only skew further out of whack. There’s the time before you lost that person, and the time after. The ways you communicated with them, and the ways you never will. The Best Buy gift cards that were spent, and the Netflix gift cards collecting dust on a shelf. Natalie Cole achieved every daughter’s dream in twisting time and technology to her will so she could share one last song with her dad.

She’d just turned 15 when her father, the legendary Nat King Cole, died due to complications from lung cancer at only 45 years old. When she was six, Natalie sang on his album, The Magic of Christmas, and then swore she’d never accompany him again. When her own career first launched, she refused to cover his songs, insisting that she’d make her own way in the music industry or wouldn’t go at all.

And she was wildly successful, earning Grammys for her 1975 debut, multi-platinum record sales, and the adoration of fans and critics alike. But the steeply mounting pressures of the industry and her past soon drove Natalie to addiction and by 1983, she’d been admitted to a rehab. Though Natalie recovered, stayed clean, and got her career back on track, her comeback albums never reached the overwhelming success of her early debuts. She still did well by every stretch of the imagination… just not Grammy-winning well. Until she tapped her before to create a brand new after.

In 1991, “through the magic of digital technology,” Billboard Magazine wrote, Natalie covered her father’s music and sang with him for the first time in her adult life on “Unforgettable.” I’d only ever heard her father in scratchy vinyl recordings from my own dad’s collection. The only time I saw Nat King Cole performing was in commercials peddling his greatest hits or in vintage holiday specials on Nick at Nite. (There’s probably at least one of you reading this who has absolutely no context for anything in that previous sentence, and I’m sorry.)

So when Natalie sang a perfectly sound engineered & mastered duet with her dad, and then actually appeared alongside him in a music video featuring the Cole family’s own private footage of their patriarch, it was momentous in American music, technological and cultural history. For the first time, not only could we hear a person from beyond the grave, we saw them bring an entirely new performance to life with their own child. There had been nothing like it before, and I struggle to think of any song recorded under the same circumstances since. It’s become one of those moments in time no one can adequately describe. You had to have lived it.

Thankfully, I can show it to you, because not only did Natalie achieve this incredible feat on film, but her editors and producers compiled it beautifully in animations, in timing, and you can tell that a great deal of care went into seemingly small details that make a big difference in the finished product, like the transitions between Natalie’s parts and her Dad’s. I can’t tell you how it felt to see this happening in real time, especially as a daughter who loved sharing music with her own dad, but you probably have at least the slightest bit of modern day context. Consider this me going on record in my loudest voice to say that without Natalie and Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable,” technology like dead musician holograms and even deep fakes (existing images or videos so skillfully replaced with another person’s face that they appear real⁠—see Kendrick Lamar’s “The Heart Part 5”) wouldn’t be the same concepts that they are today.

“Unforgettable” exists in a collective of early digital creations that inspired us to question the possibilities, and whether we could shape our past and present into a more desirable future. In 1990, the year before “Unforgettable” was released, virtual reality sci-fantasy “Total Recall” was the #1 movie in America. The Flying Car Future and Transporter Magic of TV weren’t quite realities, but they were starting to seem like possibilities… as though WE HAD THE TECHNOLOGY.

We didn’t. We still don’t. But that’s the real beauty of “Unforgettable.” Strip away the technology, and what’s left is simply a father and daughter sharing a touching, heartfelt song. Of all the modern marvels we’ve built and technological advances we’ve seen, nothing comes close to that kind of simple, timeless, and truly unforgettable magic.

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