Who Sang Im Alive Again Repeated Over and Over
Information technology's pretty common in music circles to encounter people who have spent literally decades trying to identify an obscure vocal on an old mixtape. They've had no luck Googling lyrics or playing the song into Soundhound, Shazam, or friends' ears. In that location are entire communities—on websites similar 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'thousand Brainypants McMusicface; to the contrary. In every instance these have been songs and artists I'd never heard (or fifty-fifty heard of) earlier.
But the recordings contained the necessary clues and context, to which I applied some deductive reasoning and research done on freely-available websites. Here'southward how I've gone about information technology, in instance crowdsourcing isn't working for y'all.
I example: Slicing Up Eyeballs posted this to both Facebook and Twitter.
Can you ID this funky post-punk vocal taped off WNYU in the '80s?
A Slicing Up Eyeballs reader sent us the following note:
"I write from Germany and then pitiful if i put words wrong. A Friend of mine was in America in the 80s and he listened to WNYU – FM. He heard a Song there but did not hear the Name and Artist. And so i have the Link here where you tin can mind to. If you don`t know information technology, maybe y'all can assist us with the Lyrics. We went them up and down with no Issue. Specially after the outset words "Oh well oh welcome ….. This might be the Refrain of the Vocal because he repeats it often in this Vocal. I would be very glad to get an answer from you considering this Vocal is searched for more than 33 Years."
The postal service was accompanied by the song's sound on Soundcloud (and had already been an open instance on Wat Zat Vocal? 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, amidst other features (like its marketplace and the power to catalog your entire music collection), it'southward a powerful search engine. The Advanced Search, which is free to use without creating an account, allows you to wait just within Track (song) Title.
Since this vocal didn't take a traditional chorus (where the championship would commonly repeat), I started making out the lyrics from the acme.
Oh well, oh welcome [turncoat?] Sam
He said he was a killer human
He doesn't care near your [love / life]
Then something nigh napalm? Sounds a bit agit-prop. That first line repeats at the outset of each verse, giving at least office of it the potential to appear in the championship. A Track Championship search for "oh well oh welcome" yielded 44 results which contained some combination of those keywords in their song titles (i.e. "oh", "well" and "welcome" might appear in three different vocal titles on a given album, non 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 equally well. Choosing Decade>1980 from the menu down the left side of the search window narrows it downward from 44 to 7.
Equally 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 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 as the "Hot Hits" compilation. If this song had ever been a hot hit, someone would have identified it past now). That left me with merely 1 result to investigate:Maxi Trip the light fantastic toe Puddle Vol. 2 – Musikladen Eurotops.
NB: Discogs, due to the mode its records are structured, returned three unlike iterations of this same album in the search results: i being the 'main folio' for that release/album and the other two detailing the separate formats of the release, CD and LP. All three are interchangeable for my purposes, then no need to wait at each.
3. Utilise streaming music resources to follow leads.
Given that my keywords were spread across 2 track titles on this compilation—"Oh Well" (by an artist of the same proper noun), and some other titled "Welcome, Machine Gun"—and that my song hardly seemed like gild provender, this was probably a dead end but I was already hither and decided to see it through. The sometime title was a better friction match to my lyric than the latter so I followed the hyperlink to the Discogs page showing Oh Well's discography. The song "Oh Well", since it was released every bit a single, had its own subpage with an embedded YouTube video, a quick scan of which proved it wasn't the song I was afterwards.
"Machine gun" didn't appear in the lyrics of my song, so it seemed casuistic to assume that the latter song had any relevance to my search. Dorsum to the drawing board.
4. Echo steps one-iii as needed.
I didn't bother pursuing the words "oh well" whatever further because, on their own, they but didn't feel distinctive or interesting plenty to be a title for this vocal. Instead, I turned my sights to "turncoat Sam." Few writers would exist able to resist making such a unique turn of phrase the hook on which to hang a song, so it had a better take a chance of appearing in the title. But that search yielded only 2 results, which were rapidly ruled out. Boosted searches for "turncoat" and "welcome turncoat" were similarly fruitless.
Out of other options, I searched for "Sam". Filtering downwardly to just the '80s nevertheless left nearly 2700 releases. Scanning the beginning page of 50 results, I eliminated annihilation immediately recognizable (east.g. T. King's "Telegram Sam"), the strange linguistic communication items, the ones obviously in non-applicable genres similar jazz, and ones in which Sam was inextricably paired with other words ("Play It Again, Sam", etc.).
At the lesser of the page my eye was drawn to a night, arty record embrace that seemed to fit the vibe I was looking for—what looked like a monoprint of a confront that was disjointed, disfigured, with violence or chaos unsaid.
It was for a single of a song called "Uncle Sam" by a grouping I'd never heard of, Rhythm of Life. Clicking through to that subpage showed that it was a Great britain release from 1981, classified as New Moving ridge. On this type of page, Discogs displays suggestions of like artists; while I wasn't intimately familiar with the ones listed hither (Josef K, Cabaret Voltaire), I knew enough to think they were reasonably aligned with my target.
I searched YouTube for "Rhythm of Life Uncle Sam," which returned 1 result; after a brief drum intro that was missing from the original postal service, 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 then close together as to sound like one word.
[Editor's annotation: that video used to be embedded correct here so that you could hear it, but has since been removed from YouTube and not replaced. In fact, Rhythm of Life's "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 ii-CD Paul Haig compilation from Brussels-based Les Disques du Crépuscule characterization. And that fact, dear reader—that the spider web giveth and the web taketh away—is a perfect example of why I e'er view my personal music library as more essential and comprehensive than any subscription-based streaming service can promise to be.]
To be off-white, intuition played a part in arriving at the solution, as did adept luck; if my song had appeared on the 50th page of "Sam" results instead of the first, would I have constitute it? (Not to mention other factors in my favor: that the song had lyrics at all, was sung in my native linguistic communication, was from an era and genre of which I have a decent if not comprehensive knowledge, etc.) Yet, this method has helped me solve half a dozen other mystery songs that had been plaguing people for 25+ years, where commonage "Well, it kind of sounds like [artist name here]" guesswork failed.
Here's one more instance off the top of my head, using the same steps—identifying the audio clues, lyrical clues, and parameters for the search.
Example #two
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 scrap 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:
Whatever name yous go past, she goes past now too
What else would she do?
She's got her last resorts in the mail service
To box three five comma oh oh oh
The search: the terminal line was the best bet. The number 35,000 spoken in that manner, equally its individual components, was then unusual that it took a while to realize that's what I was hearing, every bit opposed to the oh-oh-ohs but being song punctuations. Being catchy and unique, information technology was the well-nigh obvious hook. And radio existence a gimmicky medium, the song 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—Track Title for "35,000", and Year for 1987—took me direct to information technology: "35,000" by Insiders, from an album called Ghost On the Beach.
I'm not surprised it eluded someone for decades; information technology was a deep album cut, not a single, and information technology's non on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes or Amazon. I had to track it downwards on (now-defunct) Grooveshark in club to verify its identity.
Example #iii, without audio
Once again, Slicing Upward Eyeballs posted a reader'due south plea on Facebook.
Name THAT TUNE: Scott's having trouble tracking downward a vocal he used to accept on a mixtape. Does this band 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' trouble. '93 in college a buddy fabricated me a killer mix tape. I lost the track listing after many moves, but have managed to hunt down almost all of the songs except one. Here'south what I recall:
"The song begins with a clip of a British man calling bingo. He mentions ane number and then says 'blue? 22. Nosotros have a bingo- in Ii places.' Then it cuts into the song. That is all I retrieve. I can tell you it was '93 or prior. Whatsoever aid from the good folks who follow yous would be fantastic."
Audio clues: none. This time in that location'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 point, I don't fifty-fifty know whether the rest of the song has lyrics or is purely instrumental.
The search: I have ii facts—the bingo intro and a release date no later than 1993—and one supposition: that the artist is British, since at that place's no obvious reason for a not-Great britain creative person to source a few seconds of sound from a British bingo hall. Of course in that location'south no guarantee that the vocal's title has bingo in it, but 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 Britain (since odds are practiced that an creative person's work would be released kickoff and foremost in their native state), which narrowed the results to 562. I applied a second filter in order to run into only 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 item.
Ignoring annihilation released past 1993, I worked my mode down the starting time page of 50 results, clicking through to each item'due south detailed release page and looking upwardly songs on YouTube (if they weren't already embedded in the Discogs page). Somewhen I arrived at the anthology Reach by Snuff, released in 1992.
Since the release page featured a YouTube video of the total album and "Bingo" was rails ix of twelve, I scrubbed about 3/4 of the way into it, pausing at the gaps betwixt songs since I was interested only in the showtime of any given rails, and at the 21:32 mark is where I constitute my British bingo thespian. All told, this process took me less than xxx minutes.
I idea I was washed, but something nagged at me: YouTube also has a standalone video of just the song "Bingo", and that spoken give-and-take clip doesn't appear in information technology at all, either at the beginning or the end. Farther, the vocal in that video isn't the i post-obit the bingo hall prune in the full-album video!
After calculation upwardly the track times seen on the Discogs page, I realized that 21:32 into the anthology puts you at the terminate of "Bingo," not the beginning of information technology. Therefore, if the OP is seeking the vocal that comes after the clip, information technology'due south actually the next runway on the anthology—"Ichola Buddha"—that'south he's afterward (and, when making the mixtape, his friend may accept mistaken the bingo hall prune for the intro to that song instead of what information technology really is: the tail end of "Bingo").
Evidently my method is dependent on certain factors—not to mention some luck and intuition—and won't work in every instance, just I hope it'll be a useful tool to aid you go closer to solving your own mystery vocal. If information technology does, I'd dearest to hear your stories about where and when y'all originally came past a song, where the search took you over time, and how you lot arrived at a solution.
(cassette photo by Laurent Hoffmann)
Source: https://markfgriffin.com/2015/02/need-help-identifying-song/
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