Here We Go Again the One You Come Running to

It's pretty common in music circles to encounter people who have spent literally decades trying to identify an obscure song on an old mixtape. They've had no luck Googling lyrics or playing the song into Soundhound, Shazam, or friends' ears. At that place are entire communities—on websites like Wat Zat Song?, Midomi, and Reddit—devoted to crowdsourcing the solutions.

Many times, without what felt like much work, I've been able to successfully ID such songs for strangers. Non because I'k Brainypants McMusicface; to the reverse. In every instance these take been songs and artists I'd never heard (or even heard of) before.

Only the recordings contained the necessary clues and context, to which I applied some deductive reasoning and research done on freely-available websites. Here'south how I've gone about it, in case crowdsourcing isn't working for you.

Ane example: Slicing Up Eyeballs posted this to both Facebook and Twitter.

Can y'all ID this funky mail service-punk vocal taped off WNYU in the '80s?

A Slicing Up Eyeballs reader sent us the following annotation:

"I write from Frg so sorry if i put words wrong. A Friend of mine was in America in the 80s and he listened to WNYU – FM. He heard a Vocal there but did not hear the Proper name and Artist. Then i accept the Link here where you can listen to. If you don`t know it, maybe you can assist us with the Lyrics. Nosotros went them upward and down with no Consequence. Especially after the outset words "Oh well oh welcome ….. This might be the Refrain of the Song because he repeats it ofttimes in this Song. I would exist very glad to get an answer from you because this Song is searched for more than 33 Years."

The post was accompanied by the song's audio on Soundcloud (and had already been an open up case on Wat Zat Vocal? for over v months).

one. Examine the audio and lyrics for clues, and search for keywords on Discogs.

Discogs is a website database detailing musical artists' discographies and, among other features (like its marketplace and the ability to catalog your entire music collection), it's a powerful search engine. The Advanced Search, which is free to use without creating an business relationship, allows you to look simply within Rails (song) Title.

Since this vocal didn't have a traditional chorus (where the title would usually echo), I started making out the lyrics from the top.

Oh well, oh welcome [turncoat?] Sam
He said he was a killer man
He doesn't care about your [love / life]

So something near napalm? Sounds a bit agit-prop. That first line repeats at the beginning of each verse, giving at least office of it the potential to appear in the title. A Track Title search for "oh well oh welcome" yielded 44 results which independent some combination of those keywords in their song titles (i.due east. "oh", "well" and "welcome" might announced in iii different vocal titles on a given album, not necessarily all in the same song title).

two. Filter the search results to items released in a specific decade, geographic region, or genre.

The OP said the tape was from the '80s and the recording screams '80s as well. Choosing Decade>1980 from the carte du jour down the left side of the search window narrows it downwardly from 44 to 7.

As for genre, would Discogs have this filed under punk, funk, other? Those distinctions are subjective, which is why I opted not to use their filters for this footstep and instead eliminated results that plainly weren't the genre I was looking for (i.due east. skip over the items with "gospel" and "soul" in the titles, too every bit the "Hot Hits" compilation. If this song had ever been a hot striking, someone would have identified information technology by now). That left me with only 1 event to investigate:Maxi Dance Puddle Vol. 2 – Musikladen Eurotops.

NB: Discogs, due to the way its records are structured, returned 3 unlike iterations of this aforementioned album in the search results: one being the 'master page' for that release/anthology and the other 2 detailing the carve up formats of the release, CD and LP. All iii are interchangeable for my purposes, so no demand to wait at each.

three. Utilize streaming music resources to follow leads.

Given that my keywords were spread beyond 2 track titles on this compilation—"Oh Well" (past an artist of the same proper noun), and another titled "Welcome, Machine Gun"—and that my song hardly seemed similar lodge fodder, this was probably a expressionless terminate but I was already hither and decided to see information technology through. The erstwhile title was a meliorate match to my lyric than the latter so I followed the hyperlink to the Discogs page showing Oh Well'due south discography. The vocal "Oh Well", since information technology was released every bit a single, had its own subpage with an embedded YouTube video, a quick scan of which proved information technology wasn't the song I was after.

"Car gun" didn't appear in the lyrics of my song, then it seemed casuistic to assume that the latter song had any relevance to my search. Back to the drawing lath.

4. Echo steps 1-3 as needed.

I didn't bother pursuing the words "oh well" any farther because, on their own, they simply didn't feel distinctive or interesting plenty to exist a title for this song. Instead, I turned my sights to "turncoat Sam." Few writers would be able to resist making such a unique plough of phrase the claw on which to hang a vocal, and so it had a ameliorate gamble of appearing in the title. But that search yielded only two results, which were quickly ruled out. Additional searches for "turncoat" and "welcome turncoat" were similarly fruitless.

Out of other options, I searched for "Sam". Filtering downwards to just the '80s still left nearly 2700 releases. Scanning the first page of 50 results, I eliminated anything immediately recognizable (eastward.one thousand. T. Rex'southward "Telegram Sam"), the strange language items, the ones patently in non-applicative genres like jazz, and ones in which Sam was inextricably paired with other words ("Play It Again, Sam", etc.).

At the bottom of the folio my eye was drawn to a dark, high-sounding record cover that seemed to fit the vibe I was looking for—what looked like a monoprint of a face that was disjointed, disfigured, with violence or chaos implied.

Information technology was for a single of a song called "Uncle Sam" past a group I'd never heard of, Rhythm of Life. Clicking through to that subpage showed that it was a Uk release from 1981, classified as New Wave. On this type of page, Discogs displays suggestions of similar artists; while I wasn't intimately familiar with the ones listed hither (Josef Grand, Cabaret Voltaire), I knew enough to recollect they were reasonably aligned with my target.

I searched YouTube for "Rhythm of Life Uncle Sam," which returned i event; after a cursory drum intro that was missing from the original post, there was my song. It wasn't "turncoat Sam" afterward all… information technology was "Oh well, oh welcome to Uncle Sam", with "to" and "Uncle" sung so shut together as to sound like ane word.

[Editor'due south note: that video used to exist embedded right here and so that yous could hear information technology, but has since been removed from YouTube and not replaced. In fact, Rhythm of Life'due south "Uncle Sam" appears not to be available on any legitimate streaming service—or for digital download—in the Usa, and can only be found on a 2-CD Paul Haig compilation from Brussels-based Les Disques du Crépuscule label. And that fact, dear reader—that the web giveth and the spider web taketh abroad—is a perfect example of why I always view my personal music library as more essential and comprehensive than any subscription-based streaming service can promise to exist.]

To be fair, intuition played a part in arriving at the solution, every bit did good luck; if my song had appeared on the 50th page of "Sam" results instead of the first, would I have found it? (Not to mention other factors in my favor: that the vocal had lyrics at all, was sung in my native linguistic communication, was from an era and genre of which I take a decent if not comprehensive noesis, etc.) Still, this method has helped me solve one-half a dozen other mystery songs that had been plaguing people for 25+ years, where commonage "Well, information technology kind of sounds similar [artist name here]" guesswork failed.

Here's one more example off the elevation of my head, using the same steps—identifying the audio clues, lyrical clues, and parameters for the search.

Example #2

Audio clues: a song taped off an American alt radio station in 1988. The artist sounded American, slightly roots-rockish but with sonic polish, and a bit Paisley Underground.

Lyrical clues: a mention of Jerry Falwell bolstered my notion that it's American in origin. Focusing on the closest thing to a chorus, the only lyrics which repeat are variations of:

Any proper noun you get by, she goes past now as well
What else would she practise?
She's got her last resorts in the mail
To box 3 five comma oh oh oh

The search: the last line was the best bet. The number 35,000 spoken in that way, as its private components, was so unusual that information technology took a while to realize that'south what I was hearing, as opposed to the oh-oh-ohs simply being vocal punctuations. Being catchy and unique, it was the most obvious hook. And radio beingness a contemporary medium, the vocal was probably either released in '87 or '88; songs generally don't become airplay years after their release unless they've achieved some status. Searching Discogs in two fields—Rail Title for "35,000", and Year for 1987—took me direct to it: "35,000" by Insiders, from an album called Ghost On the Beach.

I'm not surprised it eluded someone for decades; it was a deep anthology cut, not a single, and it's not on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes or Amazon. I had to track it down on (now-defunct) Grooveshark in order to verify its identity.

Instance #3, without audio

Once again, Slicing Up Eyeballs posted a reader'southward plea on Facebook.

Proper noun THAT Tune: Scott's having trouble tracking down a song he used to accept on a mixtape. Does this ring a bell for anyone?

"I have what seems to be the common 'I had a mix tape years ago, what the hell was that song' problem. '93 in college a buddy fabricated me a killer mix record. I lost the rails listing after many moves, but have managed to hunt down almost all of the songs except one. Hither's what I remember:

"The vocal begins with a prune of a British man calling bingo. He mentions one number then says 'blue? 22. We have a bingo- in TWO places.' And then it cuts into the song. That is all I remember. I can tell you it was '93 or prior. Whatsoever assist from the good folks who follow you would be fantastic."

Audio clues: none. This time there's neither a recorded snippet nor any indication in the OP's wording about what type of music it is.

Lyrical clues: merely the spoken 'bingo' intro. At this bespeak, I don't even know whether the residue of the vocal has lyrics or is purely instrumental.

The search: I have two facts—the bingo intro and a release appointment no later than 1993—and one assumption: that the artist is British, since there'due south no obvious reason for a non-UK artist to source a few seconds of audio from a British bingo hall. Of form there's no guarantee that the song's title has bingo in it, simply that'due south the simply applied starting point.

Searching Track Title for "bingo" yielded 2,848 results. I filtered those down to items released in the Uk (since odds are good that an artist'southward work would be released first and foremost in their native country), which narrowed the results to 562. I applied a 2d filter in order to run across merely items released in the 1990s, which reduced the results to 143. So I clicked on the View options at the upper-right of the window to see the results as Text With Covers, which enabled me to see the release year for each detail.

Ignoring anything released by 1993, I worked my way down the first folio of l results, clicking through to each item's detailed release page and looking up songs on YouTube (if they weren't already embedded in the Discogs page). Somewhen I arrived at the anthology Achieve by Snuff, released in 1992.

Since the release page featured a YouTube video of the full album and "Bingo" was track nine of twelve, I scrubbed almost iii/4 of the way into it, pausing at the gaps between songs since I was interested only in the beginning of any given track, and at the 21:32 mark is where I institute my British bingo player. All told, this process took me less than 30 minutes.

I thought I was done, but something nagged at me: YouTube as well has a standalone video of just the song "Bingo", and that spoken word clip doesn't appear in it at all, either at the start or the stop. Further, the vocal in that video isn't the 1 following the bingo hall prune in the full-anthology video!

After adding up the track times seen on the Discogs folio, I realized that 21:32 into the album puts y'all at the finish of "Bingo," not the beginning of it. Therefore, if the OP is seeking the song that comes after the clip, it's actually the adjacent rails on the album—"Ichola Buddha"—that's he's later on (and, when making the mixtape, his friend may take mistaken the bingo hall clip for the intro to that vocal instead of what it really is: the tail finish of "Bingo").

Patently my method is dependent on sure factors—not to mention some luck and intuition—and won't work in every case, but I hope it'll be a useful tool to aid you get closer to solving your ain mystery song. If it does, I'd love to hear your stories about where and when you originally came by a vocal, where the search took yous over time, and how you arrived at a solution.

(cassette photograph by Laurent Hoffmann)

nicolluncloyesseen.blogspot.com

Source: https://markfgriffin.com/2015/02/need-help-identifying-song/

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