This reminds me of when I rediscovered the track-listing of a CD titled "The Best Album of the Next Century Ever" which came with boxes of Golden/Cinnamon Grahams cereal. Had some real bangers like Josephine by Terrorvision and Come On Spring by Antenna, plus some very early tracks by Space and Muse who both went on to make it pretty big. I listened to it on repeat for months as a young teen. That kind of nostalgia probably isn't available to the generations below.
For me it was a Bjork song but it was in Icelandic. I had heard it around 2010ish and didn't have the song. Because it was in Icelandic and I didn't know the name of the track I couldn't figure out how to find it - because I had streamed through all of Biorks albums on one of these streaming services and it wasn't on any of them. I don't know how similar Icelandic is to other Nordic/Scandinavian languages so maybe a speaker of these languages would have been able to identify the lyrics, but I couldn't even identify a single word from memory that I could use to search for the lyrics.
After more than a decade The Guardian had an article on Bjork and mentioned something about her fan club on Reddit. So I thought I would ask there.
That hit the jackpot, someone mentioned she had an earlier band called Tappi Tíkarrass (from 1981-1983) and it was a song they performed on some TV show.
https://youtu.be/nkuXOtFLMZw
> I don't know how similar Icelandic is to other Nordic/Scandinavian languages so maybe a speaker of these languages would have been able to identify the lyrics
Not likely, Icelandic has kept much closer to old norse in grammar and phonology so sounds nothing like continental scandinavian (also much prefers neologisms to loanwords, but that’s maybe less of an issue for song lyrics). You’d have had to ask specifically icelanders, maybe faroe islanders as a last recourse, but there’s a lot less of the latter than the former.
Yeah, as a Norwegian, I can sometimes somewhat read Icelandic, but it takes a lot of effort, and it sounds familiar but not enough for me to remotely reliably transcribe.
Her interview with Arvo Pärt (composer) is amazing. She starts off being very Björk, and as a viewer I wondered where this would go. Turns out they live on the same planet, speaking the same language.
For me it was Station Approach by Elbow [0] - the one with the giant slow semibreve vocoder chorus [1]
Not obscure at all, but i sang it to bemused twenty-somethings in a dozen record shops. I had high confidence from the timbre it was Super Furry Animals, so i also combed their catalogue. In the end i bought the album blind (deaf?) on a recommendation and was gobsmacked to find the track on it. Serendipity, baby!
[1] all this time, i thought it was a vocoder! I was just listening on crappy speakers, i guess. It's just tight vocal harmony and a production that possibly puts the bass through the vocal reverb
The streaming model really makes remembering details difficult.
I used to play only local files, and then during a time at university played in the office music on Youtube. One specific album got stuck in my head, but for a long while afterwards didn't find it again. No name, no lyrics - not a good starting point. I just remembered a pink unicorn and that is was psychedelic rock and that the singer sang with a specific deep voice. After several rounds of research (the same youtube channel is still up) and looking through uploads of the timeframe and their recommendations it turned out I misremembered: The cover had a rainbow cat looking into the distance (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ea1mYXUcBY, Whoopie cat).
How I remembered was funny. I talked to someone about this, researched while, then talked again, when something came over me to look to the side into the distance with a slightly open mouth - just to suddenly realize that this face was on the cover, not the unicorn!
But actually, I still have that image of the unicorn cover in my mind (one color silhouette, hoofs into the air, but who knows at this point). The Whoopie cat album is definitely one I heard back than and it was the music I was searching for, but the unicorn cover probably also existed in that space and was a different album. Or did I just imagine something based on space stallions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Otaq2tmNMM)?
After that experience I set up a local music player again and downloaded some of the albums I wanted to remember.
I had a similar thing. A while back, I watched the first episode of Second Chance; a rather forgettable show, that I decided not to continue, but it did have a great song, in the title: No Evil, by a Canadian singer; Serena Ryder.
> I searched for the song on Pandora. We hadn’t checked it before because it’s no longer a major music service
I find that take interesting. I use Pandora to this day as my primary streaming source, as it has my vibes down perfectly, and no other services has that many years of training into what I like to listen to. But even more important, it is almost always the music source I see when I'm restaurants. I prefer small mom-and-pop type places, so maybe I'm only seeing a niche.
I'm not trying to argue it is a leading platform, as it clearly is not. But it is fascinating that people searching for music don't check what was a leading platform 10 years ago. Especially when the music in question is older than that. And the search started when it was a leading platform.
Actually that last point really confuses me - why would today's platform popularity have limited the search 15 years ago? That part of the story makes little sense. If this search began back when Pandora was at its peak, why wouldn't they have started from there long ago?
For me it was:
A Lesson in Crime (Album) - Tokyo Police Club. Specifically the song ‘Cheer it On’.
(For anyone that saw my comment on a similar thread, I found it!).
And also a South African indie band called The Bang, who never did much, but had such a good MySpace release of an album called Shiny.
——————
Comment from the other thread:
> The thing I miss most, and the thing we’ll never get back was the cultural buy-in and network effects.
My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence before hand on their popularity or their algorithmic match to my music tastes.
The result was pure joy: my music taste would develop in all weird and wonderful directions, my favorite songs would be the one I hit back on to listen again while I moved through an album, songs that friends skipped over and didn’t know at all; bands that never charted anywhere but made interesting music… bands that never knew their music made it to an iPod in South Africa.
(I’ve got a song still stuck in my head from a Canadian indie band that made its way onto my iPod via via and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band. I love this that I’ve never found them!)
I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this, and invariably find 90% of my listening happening on algo-generated playlists of songs that sound exactly like a song I like. I never learn the names of the songs or the names of the bands as the songs go by, and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I like. It sucks.
I don’t listen to any AI generated music consciously, but given the music experience today I probably wouldn’t notice as these playlists, like a boiling frog, slowly became AI music dominated.
I bought a record player as my protest, and it gives me immense joy to find obscure records and play them through; but it’s really not the same thing, and I miss what we had.
I've had a few of these musical splinters, and most of them have worked their way out with time. One was quite recent: the music video for Underwater Love by Smoke City, which was memorable for their bullet-time-ish effect that pre-dated The Matrix by a year or few.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hesv3K4Dz9M (uploaded 12 years ago, but I couldn't find it for a long time and only looked again recently - whilst looking for Faith no More's song of the same name).
Another was the song Purple, for which the commonly shared MP3 was mislabelled as by the band Air. Turns out it was a band called Crustation, who released a single magnificent trip-hop album, with Irish vocalist Bronagh Slevin, and then disappeared into the ether. Took me a few sessions over a few years to track all that down.
Another one was a song that got high rotation for a very brief period of time (when I was on a driving holiday, and so had the radio on a lot) maybe on Triple J, early 2000s, called Media Junkies by the band of the same name. Turns out the song was actually called News Addiction. One hit wonder.
The last remaining splinter (that I can recall) is a song from the mid-90s, "eager beaver" or "tenfour" or some variation on that features heavily in the lyrics as truckers chatting over CB radios. Haven't done a search session in a number of years on that one, but never got anything close to a lead on previous attempts. Maybe it's time to have another go.
Way back then, it was the research that was at least part of the enjoyment. I think it taught me how to research, to some degree at least. I went from Faith No More to Mr Bungle, and back then it wasn't easy to find this kind of stuff. Mr Bungle then changed my entire future musical taste journey. Good times. Worth the effort.
Slightly underwhelming (and I knew it would be). My taste has changed a fair bit in the last 25 years. Looks like someone else had been looking for it almost as long as me.
I was just revisiting my own Holy Grail, though much less rare. From the Napster days: My Gay Uncle's version of "Back That Azz Up": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDj2JpJr3vU
This is the same version I downloaded randomly from Napster when I would search vaguely for "punk covers". It's just so great, but with potato recording quality (maybe naturally) and a bunch of skips and clicks that sound like a shitty CD rip or early MP3 encoding artifacts. I'd love to find an actually clean version of the song, but to no avail. It may not exist.
mesmerized by it growing up, could only recall the native american-sounding chanting. googled “hey yah heyyyyyyy” and found the answer on reddit. turns out it samples/infringes an indigenous taiwanese (amis) chant.
Thanks for posting your search. I absolutely love stories like this. I can’t help but think that music was a little more interesting when it was primarily physically released.
Gah this can be so annoying. I've got one going for 56 years. A cassette tape that I had as a kid, all I remember is that it was orange and that it had the most amazing jazzy tracks on it (mostly instrumental). I've listened to every orange labelled tape on various tape archives and still haven't found it, the memory has faded far enough that I only occasionally remember snatches of it. But I'll keep looking.
Author here. I bought this CD in 2011 and spent 15 years failing to find out who made it. The band charted at #47 on the UK Independent Singles Chart in June 2006, so it was a real, professionally made, commercially distributed record, and I couldn't find anything online: no credits, no fingerprint match, no company registration for the label, nothing on streaming.
Part of the answer turned out to be that their website was Flash, so it was never meaningfully indexed, and their MySpace was never mirrored. A band can be entirely findable in 2006 and entirely gone by 2026 depending on which technologies they happened to pick.
It was eventually solved by searching on the producer's credits rather than the band's name, and then by two people replying to cold emails. Both the producer and the singer were generous enough to be interviewed, so there's some fresh detail in there about the recording session as well.
Similar situation - guy remembers a catchy song, lyrics and all, but can’t find any trace of the band or the music. I won’t say more than that as it’s worth listening to them tell the story (The Guardian article also doesn’t spoil it).
That's an epic search but at least of all a wind at the end.
Sadly the ability to search via the usual suspects has diminished greatly from 2015 onwards, not all of it is on lack lustre efforts of search engines involved, some of the data had become just too hard to get from within forums where human intelligence rules. Of course the lack of competition from new search engines isn't good either, too many sites aim to block all but the top handful of bots from their content ...
Thanks for the note. Yeah, it was almost impossible to find the data without a ton of help. I’m sure things will change again as bot internet usage overwhelms human usage — maybe more silos, maybe more bot only interfaces. Interesting times!
> A band can be entirely findable in 2006 and entirely gone by 2026 depending on which technologies they happened to pick.
This is interesting, and in some cases desirable. I wonder what technology choices one could make today if they wanted to have an internet presence now but not have it stored forever. Would that even be possible today?
A good read, thank you. There are many excellent bands and songs gone through time. It can be difficult to discover rare songs, or even slightly out there ones, through streaming apps like Spotify.
After more than a decade The Guardian had an article on Bjork and mentioned something about her fan club on Reddit. So I thought I would ask there.
That hit the jackpot, someone mentioned she had an earlier band called Tappi Tíkarrass (from 1981-1983) and it was a song they performed on some TV show. https://youtu.be/nkuXOtFLMZw
Not likely, Icelandic has kept much closer to old norse in grammar and phonology so sounds nothing like continental scandinavian (also much prefers neologisms to loanwords, but that’s maybe less of an issue for song lyrics). You’d have had to ask specifically icelanders, maybe faroe islanders as a last recourse, but there’s a lot less of the latter than the former.
Not obscure at all, but i sang it to bemused twenty-somethings in a dozen record shops. I had high confidence from the timbre it was Super Furry Animals, so i also combed their catalogue. In the end i bought the album blind (deaf?) on a recommendation and was gobsmacked to find the track on it. Serendipity, baby!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2k5EfLPB3A
[1] all this time, i thought it was a vocoder! I was just listening on crappy speakers, i guess. It's just tight vocal harmony and a production that possibly puts the bass through the vocal reverb
I used to play only local files, and then during a time at university played in the office music on Youtube. One specific album got stuck in my head, but for a long while afterwards didn't find it again. No name, no lyrics - not a good starting point. I just remembered a pink unicorn and that is was psychedelic rock and that the singer sang with a specific deep voice. After several rounds of research (the same youtube channel is still up) and looking through uploads of the timeframe and their recommendations it turned out I misremembered: The cover had a rainbow cat looking into the distance (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ea1mYXUcBY, Whoopie cat).
How I remembered was funny. I talked to someone about this, researched while, then talked again, when something came over me to look to the side into the distance with a slightly open mouth - just to suddenly realize that this face was on the cover, not the unicorn!
But actually, I still have that image of the unicorn cover in my mind (one color silhouette, hoofs into the air, but who knows at this point). The Whoopie cat album is definitely one I heard back than and it was the music I was searching for, but the unicorn cover probably also existed in that space and was a different album. Or did I just imagine something based on space stallions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Otaq2tmNMM)?
After that experience I set up a local music player again and downloaded some of the albums I wanted to remember.
I had a similar thing. A while back, I watched the first episode of Second Chance; a rather forgettable show, that I decided not to continue, but it did have a great song, in the title: No Evil, by a Canadian singer; Serena Ryder.
Good luck finding it. If you do, let me know.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4378456/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subways_of_Your_Mind#Online_se...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22636989 2020 (82 comments)
I find that take interesting. I use Pandora to this day as my primary streaming source, as it has my vibes down perfectly, and no other services has that many years of training into what I like to listen to. But even more important, it is almost always the music source I see when I'm restaurants. I prefer small mom-and-pop type places, so maybe I'm only seeing a niche.
I'm not trying to argue it is a leading platform, as it clearly is not. But it is fascinating that people searching for music don't check what was a leading platform 10 years ago. Especially when the music in question is older than that. And the search started when it was a leading platform.
Actually that last point really confuses me - why would today's platform popularity have limited the search 15 years ago? That part of the story makes little sense. If this search began back when Pandora was at its peak, why wouldn't they have started from there long ago?
(For anyone that saw my comment on a similar thread, I found it!).
And also a South African indie band called The Bang, who never did much, but had such a good MySpace release of an album called Shiny.
—————— Comment from the other thread: > The thing I miss most, and the thing we’ll never get back was the cultural buy-in and network effects.
My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence before hand on their popularity or their algorithmic match to my music tastes.
The result was pure joy: my music taste would develop in all weird and wonderful directions, my favorite songs would be the one I hit back on to listen again while I moved through an album, songs that friends skipped over and didn’t know at all; bands that never charted anywhere but made interesting music… bands that never knew their music made it to an iPod in South Africa.
(I’ve got a song still stuck in my head from a Canadian indie band that made its way onto my iPod via via and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band. I love this that I’ve never found them!)
I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this, and invariably find 90% of my listening happening on algo-generated playlists of songs that sound exactly like a song I like. I never learn the names of the songs or the names of the bands as the songs go by, and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I like. It sucks.
I don’t listen to any AI generated music consciously, but given the music experience today I probably wouldn’t notice as these playlists, like a boiling frog, slowly became AI music dominated.
I bought a record player as my protest, and it gives me immense joy to find obscure records and play them through; but it’s really not the same thing, and I miss what we had.
Can’t believe how many of my band crushes from my iPod days were Canadian!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hesv3K4Dz9M (uploaded 12 years ago, but I couldn't find it for a long time and only looked again recently - whilst looking for Faith no More's song of the same name).
Another was the song Purple, for which the commonly shared MP3 was mislabelled as by the band Air. Turns out it was a band called Crustation, who released a single magnificent trip-hop album, with Irish vocalist Bronagh Slevin, and then disappeared into the ether. Took me a few sessions over a few years to track all that down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKNJCVruRLc
https://bronaghslevin.com/
Another one was a song that got high rotation for a very brief period of time (when I was on a driving holiday, and so had the radio on a lot) maybe on Triple J, early 2000s, called Media Junkies by the band of the same name. Turns out the song was actually called News Addiction. One hit wonder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyZxYopvowA
The last remaining splinter (that I can recall) is a song from the mid-90s, "eager beaver" or "tenfour" or some variation on that features heavily in the lyrics as truckers chatting over CB radios. Haven't done a search session in a number of years on that one, but never got anything close to a lead on previous attempts. Maybe it's time to have another go.
Way back then, it was the research that was at least part of the enjoyment. I think it taught me how to research, to some degree at least. I went from Faith No More to Mr Bungle, and back then it wasn't easy to find this kind of stuff. Mr Bungle then changed my entire future musical taste journey. Good times. Worth the effort.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXlWWeDLxYU
Slightly underwhelming (and I knew it would be). My taste has changed a fair bit in the last 25 years. Looks like someone else had been looking for it almost as long as me.
Released in 98 or 99. 27 years. Satisfying.
I was just revisiting my own Holy Grail, though much less rare. From the Napster days: My Gay Uncle's version of "Back That Azz Up": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDj2JpJr3vU
This is the same version I downloaded randomly from Napster when I would search vaguely for "punk covers". It's just so great, but with potato recording quality (maybe naturally) and a bunch of skips and clicks that sound like a shitty CD rip or early MP3 encoding artifacts. I'd love to find an actually clean version of the song, but to no avail. It may not exist.
mesmerized by it growing up, could only recall the native american-sounding chanting. googled “hey yah heyyyyyyy” and found the answer on reddit. turns out it samples/infringes an indigenous taiwanese (amis) chant.
I think I bought the "A Lesson In Crime" EP a long time ago, because a song from it got me hooked during a Michel Gondry movie?
Never bothered to look for their roots. Cool pointer! Thanks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1319995
Gah this can be so annoying. I've got one going for 56 years. A cassette tape that I had as a kid, all I remember is that it was orange and that it had the most amazing jazzy tracks on it (mostly instrumental). I've listened to every orange labelled tape on various tape archives and still haven't found it, the memory has faded far enough that I only occasionally remember snatches of it. But I'll keep looking.
Other ones: Tony Banks, Portrait of Jerry Jackson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_U0jhtzmzI
Cori Josias, Takin' it straight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPuCra-t_Bw
Part of the answer turned out to be that their website was Flash, so it was never meaningfully indexed, and their MySpace was never mirrored. A band can be entirely findable in 2006 and entirely gone by 2026 depending on which technologies they happened to pick.
It was eventually solved by searching on the producer's credits rather than the band's name, and then by two people replying to cold emails. Both the producer and the singer were generous enough to be interviewed, so there's some fresh detail in there about the recording session as well.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/mar/10/reply-a...
Similar situation - guy remembers a catchy song, lyrics and all, but can’t find any trace of the band or the music. I won’t say more than that as it’s worth listening to them tell the story (The Guardian article also doesn’t spoil it).
Sadly the ability to search via the usual suspects has diminished greatly from 2015 onwards, not all of it is on lack lustre efforts of search engines involved, some of the data had become just too hard to get from within forums where human intelligence rules. Of course the lack of competition from new search engines isn't good either, too many sites aim to block all but the top handful of bots from their content ...
This is interesting, and in some cases desirable. I wonder what technology choices one could make today if they wanted to have an internet presence now but not have it stored forever. Would that even be possible today?
try searching for "bad imitation of U2"
>where they were based
they're not based
but if you've tried all that and you still haven't found what you're looking for, try searching "U2 I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=I+Still+Haven%2...