Ask Lemmy

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.

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 :/

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.

Years ago, I downloaded a relaxed-tempo, acoustic version of "Everlong" by the Foo Fighters, that was fantastic. I lost it when my stupid, proprietary NAS decided to re-initialize both RAID disks. I've searched repeatedly, but all that ever comes up is Dave Grohl's solo performance on The Howard Stern Show.

There's a particular mix or mashup of 'The Hanging Tree' with some absolutely magical and trance inducing vocal chops. I've spent a buyer's remorse amount of time searching for it with no prize.

It's so good. Hearing it felt like being sucked off. Pls someone help.

On an episode of CSI, Snakes, there's a great Hispanic song, something about "Corazon". I never have quite figured out what it is but I really dig it.

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.

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.

Back in the early days of pirating, I found an acoustic version of The Cure's Jupiter Crash. It was beautiful. I tried for years to find it after losing my CD with it and eventually gave up.

Not a song, but two albums I used to have. One was a Moroccan saxaphonist and the other was amazing upbeat Ethiopian folk/pop. I have given up.

Not a song per say. But vague over used band names.

I'm really into synthwave right now and there are two artists I want to listen to. 1. Victim 2. Anne.

Good luck searching for these artists.

Early 00's I used to listen to my brothers playlist on Windows Media Player. One of the songs was a gloomy/trance(?) remix of classical music. He had named it (something) Beethoven mix.

On multiple occasions I tried searching for it. Both the mix and the original song to make the search easier. But since I'm not at home with classical music I couldn't figure out either of them. Not sure if it even was one of Beethovens pieces.

Took me years to find Ievan polkka

White rapper, has a music video with him in his apartment drinking a beer with a tv tray, ridding with P diddy in a limo, under an overpass i think, a line in the song about a girl thinking he was mack miller. Been unable to find the guy/music after i deleted my old google/youtube account years ago.

14 years ago when I was still relatively young and liked clubbing, a song popped up and swept all the playlists in my country. Clubs, radio stations, you name it. Catchy French song. It came and went so fast that I didn't manage to memorise it. That was long before I even dreamed of having a smartphone. When I moved to UK a year later, nobody had any idea what song I'm trying to describe, like they never heard it.

Probably around 8 years ago I was roaming the streets of Porto with my ex, and a shop we passed had the song blasting from the speakers. Praise the smartphones, I used 'what's the song' app and et voila: Stromae - alors on danse

I remember hearing this song all the time on the radio when I was younger, of course I started hearing it less and less. After probably 7 or 8 years of not hearing the song once I caught the very end of it on a rock radio station. I was like "oh wow I remember this song". I tried to Shazam it but it ended right then, and I didn't know any of the lyrics. I tried humming it to my brother, no dice.

Probably a year or two later I hear it on the radio again (my local radio kinda stinks so I don't listen often). "Oh shit this is it". Go to Shazam it, song ends. "Fuck". This happened no joke like two or three more times over the next year or two, but then I finally got it: No one knows - Queens of the Stone Age

My main electronic music growing up was Hard-Trance and then DnB, but we had a friend who DJed House/Big Beat and he would drop this feelgood banger that would get us smiling.

Lost the name of it for about 7 years before someone knew what I was talking about, then I forgot the name for about another 10 years before getting it again.

Will never forget it now.

Tune was only known to us as the 'RingKingKing song' Link here

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.

A song evaded me for maybe 5 or 6 years once. I ended up having this same conversation about evasive songs with someone and did my best at an impression, because it's instrumental.

"Doo-d' Doo Doo, Doodoo Doo, Doo-d' Doo Doo, Doodoo Doo..."

The person I was talking to instantly said it was Eple - Röyksopp, and was entirely correct.

Old rave music mixtapes.

I had a tape labeled as “sluggo vs urban: annihilation” that I simply loved to death. The tapes are long gone and I never found the artists/DJs again.

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.