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Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world
udon @lemmy.world

What is a song you wanted to find again for a long time, but it gave you no clear clue about how to search for it?

I would also be curious to hear how you eventually found it again!

One to start: Conquest for paradise by vangelis. Just randomly woke up one morning with the song plus title in my head

89 comments

  • There's a Kiwi reggae band called Fat Freddy's Drop, and I got the mp3s of their first album Based on a True Story from a friend not too long after it came out. Later I lost them on an old HD, and when I went to get the album again most of the songs were different versions, and noticeably worse than what I remember. I've been able to track down a few of the old versions over the years but not all of them.

    Part of the difficulty is not knowing what the versions I first heard were. They didn't sound live so it's not as simple as trying to find concert versions. Trying to find a specific version of a song can be more frustrating than not knowing what a song is entirely :/

  • When I was a kid in 1992/93, I'd listen to the local hip-hop station. They're play house music at night and there'd be a track that would come up that was super catchy. Being the early 90s, and late night radio of just hour long mixed music, they'd never call out the song title and there's was no internet to look it up on a playlist or something. It also didn't help that the song was basically nonsensical lyrics, so describing the song by it's lyrics was pretty worthless. Though I did try to look for it through the years, I never had much luck. It was so strange to me that a seemingly popular song just disappeared like that.

    At some point in the late 2000s, I managed to discover a forum that specialized in identifying songs. I happened to have a recording of the song on cassette from the days I'd sit by the radio with my thumb on the record button for when my favorite songs would come up. I uploaded a small clip of it for them to identify it. A few days later after some incorrectly identified songs, someone says, "Nightcrawlers- Push the Feeling On". Damn! I was elated! I looked it up on YouTube and there it was, with a music video too! I was very happy that day.

  • There was a song that played on the radio a really long time ago, I remember that someone had requested it, and I remember how it sounded, but not any of the lyrics. It sounded really heavenly, a woman with a highish voice was singing, and the song sounded really old fashioned but also kind of new at the same time. It sounded like nothing that would've played on the station it was playing on, it was actually kinda jarring in the best way possible. I wish I could find it!

    The best way I can describe it is that it had a really similar vibe to Les Fleur by Minnie Riperton, particularly the quieter parts. The singer would end their vocals in an "ahh" kind of sound.

  • A techno mix made with Super Mario bros. from the early 2000s most likely from Napster or Kazaa. It wasn't a melody from any of the Mario games, but it was constructed with sounds from it.

  • When I was a young teen, one of my friends gave me a floppy disk of midi song files she liked a lot but they mostly had names like "ANIME 2" so I had no idea where they came from. There was one on there I was particularly obsessed with but could never find. Then one serendipitous day, I did. It was The Destruction of Laputa from Castle in the Sky.

    Edit: Or it was Sora from Escaflowne. There's been a few times I heard an instrumental or non-English song with no source to go off of.

  • I had the tune to Men of Harlech stuck in my head for almost 20 years, then I randomly watched a video about Wales that used it, and I was able to make the connection from there.

  • There's this one blues song that had a line about a "sweet little thing" by a guy down in Louisiana doing this southern rock style blues. I liked the song in a situationship that ended weird, quit using the streaming service I discovered the song with, and now I can't remember enough to find it.

    Edit: ::: spoiler Tab Benoit "Little Girl Blues" I tried plugging it in to the Mixtral 8×7B I have up right now and got it, or at least the name of the artist was right:

    Question: There was a song I really liked that was from a guy down in Louisiana that sang in a bayou blues meets southern rock style. The chorus and maybe even the name of the song was something about a "sweet little thing". I first heard it on Spotify around 2017. I remember looking up the guy's name and he was touring around the USA at the time. Do you have any idea who I'm talking about?

    Factual answer: The song is likely "Sweet Little Thing" by Tab Benoit, a blues musician from Louisiana known for his bayou-influenced sound. He has been actively touring in the United States since at least 2017. This information aligns with your description of the artist and song. ::: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZCCT8Cv62M

  • I been trying to find one for a while. Its from a metal band and may be on a relatively new abum. I tried search, ai, looking though history and can't for the life of me find anything past a fragment of lyrics I can vaugly understand. I think IRS from a rather mainstream band but not one I'm familiar enough with.
    I don't remember enough and most of its hard to understand the lyrics are close in sound but likely wrong AF.

    Screaming:
    ... The more i see the less i feel. Reminding my self it not real...(no not Slipknot but its very similar sound to that lyric but Slipknot overwritten what I remembered since its sounds so damn close)

    A slower section of the song, a whispery voice sings something along the lines of:

    "...can you feel me from the side lines, friend"

    May have been can you see me in the (spotlight or distance) friend.

  • As a kid I had heard Got my Mind Set on you by George Harrison on the radio once or twice.

    A few years later when I was starting to listen to music for myself I heard the Weird Al parody, and wanted to track down the original. I didn't remember any lyrics to the original so the best I could do was accost people with a very poorly sung chorus of "this song is just six words long."

    It didn't go well. I didn't find the original until the Internet had caught up enough for me to find it easily.

    I had a similar arc with Downtown by Petula Clark. Thankfully without me trying to sing a parody chorus at anyone.

  • I remember a song that still rings in my mind to this day and I remember watching it way back when MuchMusic existed on cable in my country. I just don't know the lyrics, I don't know the band. The only vivid thing I remember was parts of it's music video and I tried going off on that.

    With the way search engines are today, it's hard to find results when all you've got is vague details. It sucks even more when you know exactly what you're talking about but the search engine drags in irrelevant contexts to what you're looking for.

    I was only ever once able to find another seemingly lost track I heard of that I also only knew the sound but nothing of the lyrics or band. The only way I found that was through a lyric site, that I also forgot about. It was this industrial song that turned out to be 'War' by Wumpscut.

    • Wumpscut

      I was thoroughly convinced I was the only person to have the algo show me that band.

  • Creative use of search engines and possible lyrics have helped chip away at most of my list over the years. But two tough ones have been bouncing around my head since the early 90s.

    One was a rap song I remembered from the radio with a really catchy hook. Then a few years ago during a birthday party the hook was suddenly just there blaring from the speakers, so I grabbed for my phone to search the audio. People yelled at me to put it away and keep dancing, but only I knew what was at stake! The song that was playing was Wilfredo Vargas - Abusadora, although clearly that's not even remotely rap. But knowing that title, it wasn't long before I found the song from my memory, which had sampled it. It turns out the original song is much better.

    The second one was even more elusive, but it kind of nagged at me because even as a kid I had a sense of how massively popular this Spanish-language song was, so it felt like this one should be easy to find. But just a year or two ago I heard it blaring from the speakers while walking past a restaurant! Again with the audio search, I managed to identify it as Kaoma - Lambada and, whoops, my memory was wrong and it wasn't even Spanish! But I was right about it being massively popular — plus the song has been widely covered, remixed and sampled (and even that popular version was itself a cover). Except none of this would have helped because the part of the song I thought was catchy was clearly not the iconic hook melody that everyone knows, so humming it for people never helped anyone get close to the answer.

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