60s Song That Sounds Like Can't Get Enough of You Baby

Information technology'due south pretty mutual 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. There 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. Not considering I'chiliad Brainypants McMusicface; to the contrary. In every instance these have been songs and artists I'd never heard (or fifty-fifty heard of) before.

But the recordings independent the necessary clues and context, to which I applied some deductive reasoning and research done on freely-available websites. Hither's how I've gone about it, in instance crowdsourcing isn't working for you.

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

Can yous ID this funky mail service-punk song taped off WNYU in the '80s?

A Slicing Up Eyeballs reader sent us the following note:

"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 at that place but did non hear the Name and Artist. And so i have the Link here where yous can listen to. If yous don`t know information technology, maybe you can aid us with the Lyrics. We went them up and down with no Event. Peculiarly after the beginning words "Oh well oh welcome ….. This might be the Refrain of the Song because he repeats it often in this Song. I would be very glad to get an answer from you because this Vocal is searched for more 33 Years."

The post was accompanied by the song'southward audio on Soundcloud (and had already been an open case on Wat Zat Song? for over five months).

1. Examine the sound 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 account, allows you to look just within Track (song) Title.

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

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

Then something about napalm? Sounds a bit agit-prop. That get-go 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 contained some combination of those keywords in their vocal titles (i.e. "oh", "well" and "welcome" might appear in three different song titles on a given album, non necessarily all in the same song championship).

2. 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 down from 44 to 7.

As for genre, would Discogs take this filed under punk, funk, other? Those distinctions are subjective, which is why I opted not to employ their filters for this step and instead eliminated results that obviously weren't the genre I was looking for (i.e. skip over the items with "gospel" and "soul" in the titles, besides equally the "Hot Hits" compilation. If this vocal had ever been a hot hit, someone would have identified information technology by now). That left me with only one event to investigate:Maxi Trip the light fantastic toe Pool Vol. 2 – Musikladen Eurotops.

NB: Discogs, due to the way its records are structured, returned three dissimilar iterations of this same anthology in the search results: one being the 'master page' for that release/album and the other ii detailing the split formats of the release, CD and LP. All three are interchangeable for my purposes, so no need to look at each.

iii. Use streaming music resources to follow leads.

Given that my keywords were spread across ii track titles on this compilation—"Oh Well" (past an artist of the same name), and some other titled "Welcome, Car Gun"—and that my song hardly seemed like club fodder, this was probably a expressionless end but I was already here and decided to run across it through. The former title was a better friction match to my lyric than the latter and so I followed the hyperlink to the Discogs page showing Oh Well'south discography. The vocal "Oh Well", since it was released as 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 afterward.

"Machine gun" didn't announced in the lyrics of my song, so it seemed illogical to assume that the latter song had whatever relevance to my search. Back to the drawing lath.

4. Repeat steps 1-3 equally needed.

I didn't bother pursuing the words "oh well" any further because, on their ain, they simply didn't feel distinctive or interesting enough 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 plow of phrase the claw on which to hang a vocal, so information technology had a better chance of actualization in the title. Simply that search yielded only two results, which were speedily ruled out. Additional searches for "turncoat" and "welcome turncoat" were similarly fruitless.

Out of other options, I searched for "Sam". Filtering downward to simply the '80s nevertheless left about 2700 releases. Scanning the kickoff folio of 50 results, I eliminated annihilation immediately recognizable (e.g. T. Male monarch'due south "Telegram Sam"), the strange language items, the ones plainly in non-applicable genres like jazz, and ones in which Sam was inextricably paired with other words ("Play It Again, Sam", etc.).

At the lesser of the page my centre was drawn to a dark, arty record encompass 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.

It was for a unmarried of a vocal called "Uncle Sam" by a grouping I'd never heard of, Rhythm of Life. Clicking through to that subpage showed that information technology was a UK release from 1981, classified as New Wave. On this type of folio, Discogs displays suggestions of similar artists; while I wasn't intimately familiar with the ones listed here (Josef Thousand, Cabaret Voltaire), I knew enough to remember they were reasonably aligned with my target.

I searched YouTube for "Rhythm of Life Uncle Sam," which returned i result; after a brief drum intro that was missing from the original post, in that location was my song. It wasn't "turncoat Sam" after all… it was "Oh well, oh welcome to Uncle Sam", with "to" and "Uncle" sung so close together equally to sound like one word.

[Editor'southward notation: that video used to be embedded correct here so that you could hear information technology, but has since been removed from YouTube and non replaced. In fact, Rhythm of Life's "Uncle Sam" appears not to be available on whatsoever legitimate streaming service—or for digital download—in the US, and tin can but 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 web taketh away—is a perfect instance of why I always view my personal music library as more than essential and comprehensive than any subscription-based streaming service can hope to be.]

To exist fair, intuition played a function in arriving at the solution, as did good luck; if my song had appeared on the 50th page of "Sam" results instead of the first, would I accept establish it? (Not to mention other factors in my favor: that the song had lyrics at all, was sung in my native language, was from an era and genre of which I have a decent if not comprehensive noesis, etc.) Withal, this method has helped me solve half a dozen other mystery songs that had been plaguing people for 25+ years, where collective "Well, it kind of sounds like [artist name here]" guesswork failed.

Here'south one more example off the top of my head, using the aforementioned steps—identifying the audio clues, lyrical clues, and parameters for the search.

Case #two

Audio clues: a vocal taped off an American alt radio station in 1988. The artist sounded American, slightly roots-rockish merely with sonic polish, and a chip Paisley Hugger-mugger.

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

Whatever proper name you become past, she goes by at present likewise
What else would she practise?
She'due south got her last resorts in the mail
To box three 5 comma oh oh oh

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

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

Example #iii, without audio

Once more, Slicing Upwards Eyeballs posted a reader's plea on Facebook.

NAME THAT Melody: Scott's having problem tracking downward a song he used to have on a mixtape. Does this ring a bong 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 made me a killer mix tape. I lost the track list after many moves, but have managed to hunt downwards almost all of the songs except one. Here's what I remember:

"The song begins with a clip of a British human calling bingo. He mentions one number and then says 'blue? 22. We have a bingo- in Ii places.' Then it cuts into the vocal. That is all I think. I can tell yous it was '93 or prior. Whatsoever help from the practiced 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 diction almost what type of music it is.

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

The search: I take two facts—the bingo intro and a release engagement no later than 1993—and one assumption: that the artist is British, since there'south no obvious reason for a non-Uk creative person to source a few seconds of audio from a British bingo hall. Of course there'southward no guarantee that the song'due south championship has bingo in it, only that's the only practical starting point.

Searching Track Title for "bingo" yielded 2,848 results. I filtered those downwards to items released in the UK (since odds are expert that an artist's work would be released offset and foremost in their native country), which narrowed the results to 562. I applied a second filter in order to see just 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 meet the release year for each detail.

Ignoring anything released past 1993, I worked my way down the kickoff page of 50 results, clicking through to each item's detailed release page and looking upwards songs on YouTube (if they weren't already embedded in the Discogs page). Somewhen I arrived at the album Achieve by Snuff, released in 1992.

Since the release page featured a YouTube video of the full album and "Bingo" was runway nine of twelve, I scrubbed well-nigh 3/four of the fashion into it, pausing at the gaps between songs since I was interested only in the showtime of any given runway, and at the 21:32 mark is where I found my British bingo player. All told, this process took me less than thirty minutes.

I thought I was done, only something nagged at me: YouTube also has a standalone video of just the song "Bingo", and that spoken word clip doesn't appear in it at all, either at the beginning or the end. Further, the song in that video isn't the one post-obit the bingo hall prune in the full-album video!

After adding up the track times seen on the Discogs page, I realized that 21:32 into the album puts you at the end of "Bingo," non the showtime of information technology. Therefore, if the OP is seeking the song that comes after the clip, it'due south really the side by side track on the anthology—"Ichola Buddha"—that's he'southward after (and, when making the mixtape, his friend may have mistaken the bingo hall clip for the intro to that vocal instead of what it really is: the tail end of "Bingo").

Evidently my method is dependent on certain factors—non to mention some luck and intuition—and won't piece of work in every example, simply I hope it'll exist a useful tool to help you go 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 song, where the search took you over time, and how you arrived at a solution.

(cassette photo by Laurent Hoffmann)

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

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