The Song That Goes Get Down Baby Get Low in the Chorus New Girl Singer

It'south pretty mutual in music circles to see people who have spent literally decades trying to identify an obscure song on an sometime mixtape. They've had no luck Googling lyrics or playing the vocal 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 because I'm Brainypants McMusicface; to the contrary. In every instance these have been songs and artists I'd never heard (or even heard of) before.

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

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

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

A Slicing Up Eyeballs reader sent us the post-obit note:

"I write from Frg so lamentable 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 merely did non hear the Name and Artist. So i accept the Link here where y'all can listen to. If you lot don`t know it, maybe you can aid us with the Lyrics. We went them up and down with no Result. Especially later on the beginning words "Oh well oh welcome ….. This might exist the Refrain of the Song because he repeats it frequently in this Song. I would be very glad to get an answer from you because this Song is searched for more than than 33 Years."

The postal service was accompanied by the vocal'due south audio on Soundcloud (and had already been an open instance 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'south a powerful search engine. The Advanced Search, which is free to use without creating an business relationship, allows yous to expect just inside Track (song) Championship.

Since this song didn't take 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 man
He doesn't care about your [beloved / life]

Then something about napalm? Sounds a bit agit-prop. That first line repeats at the beginning of each poesy, giving at least part 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 vocal titles (i.due east. "oh", "well" and "welcome" might appear in 3 different vocal titles on a given album, not necessarily all in the aforementioned song title).

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

The OP said the record was from the '80s and the recording screams '80s as well. Choosing Decade>1980 from the card down the left side of the search window narrows it down from 44 to seven.

Equally for genre, would Discogs have this filed nether punk, funk, other? Those distinctions are subjective, which is why I opted non 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, as well equally the "Hot Hits" compilation. If this song had always been a hot hit, someone would have identified it by now). That left me with simply one result to investigate:Maxi Trip the light fantastic toe Puddle Vol. 2 – Musikladen Eurotops.

NB: Discogs, due to the way its records are structured, returned iii different iterations of this same anthology in the search results: ane being the 'master page' for that release/album and the other two detailing the split formats of the release, CD and LP. All 3 are interchangeable for my purposes, so no need to expect at each.

3. Utilise streaming music resources to follow leads.

Given that my keywords were spread beyond two runway titles on this compilation—"Oh Well" (past an artist of the aforementioned name), and another titled "Welcome, Machine Gun"—and that my song hardly seemed similar guild fodder, this was probably a dead end simply I was already hither and decided to see it through. The former championship was a improve lucifer to my lyric than the latter and so I followed the hyperlink to the Discogs page showing Oh Well's discography. The song "Oh Well", since it was released as a single, had its own subpage with an embedded YouTube video, a quick browse of which proved it wasn't the song I was later.

"Machine gun" didn't announced in the lyrics of my song, so information technology seemed illogical to assume that the latter vocal had any relevance to my search. Back to the drawing board.

4. Repeat steps ane-3 as needed.

I didn't bother pursuing the words "oh well" whatever further because, on their own, they just didn't experience distinctive or interesting enough to be a championship for this song. Instead, I turned my sights to "turncoat Sam." Few writers would be able to resist making such a unique turn of phrase the claw on which to hang a song, so information technology had a ameliorate chance of actualization in the championship. 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 down to just the '80s still left virtually 2700 releases. Scanning the first page of 50 results, I eliminated anything immediately recognizable (eastward.chiliad. T. Rex'southward "Telegram Sam"), the foreign language items, the ones obviously in non-applicable genres like jazz, and ones in which Sam was inextricably paired with other words ("Play It Once more, Sam", etc.).

At the lesser of the page my eye was fatigued to a dark, arty record cover that seemed to fit the vibe I was looking for—what looked similar 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 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 here (Josef K, Cabaret Voltaire), I knew enough to recall they were reasonably aligned with my target.

I searched YouTube for "Rhythm of Life Uncle Sam," which returned ane result; after a brief drum intro that was missing from the original post, in that location was my song. Information technology 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 ane word.

[Editor's notation: that video used to be embedded right here so that y'all could hear it, just 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 US, and can only be found on a ii-CD Paul Haig compilation from Brussels-based Les Disques du Crépuscule label. And that fact, honey reader—that the web giveth and the web taketh away—is a perfect example of why I always view my personal music library as more than essential and comprehensive than whatever subscription-based streaming service can hope to be.]

To exist fair, intuition played a part in arriving at the solution, as did practiced luck; if my song had appeared on the 50th folio of "Sam" results instead of the commencement, would I have found 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 non comprehensive knowledge, etc.) Still, 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 similar [artist name hither]" guesswork failed.

Here's 1 more than case off the top of my head, using the same steps—identifying the sound 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 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:

Whatever proper noun you go by, she goes by now likewise
What else would she do?
She'southward got her last resorts in the postal service
To box three five comma oh oh oh

The search: the last line was the best bet. The number 35,000 spoken in that way, equally its individual components, was so unusual that it took a while to realize that'south what I was hearing, equally opposed to the oh-oh-ohs simply being vocal punctuations. Being catchy and unique, it was the about obvious hook. And radio being 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 accomplished some status. Searching Discogs in ii fields—Track Title for "35,000", and Year for 1987—took me straight to it: "35,000" by Insiders, from an album called Ghost On the Embankment.

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

Example #iii, without audio

Over again, Slicing Upward Eyeballs posted a reader'southward plea on Facebook.

NAME THAT Melody: Scott's having problem tracking down a vocal he used to have on a mixtape. Does this ring a bong for anyone?

"I accept what seems to be the mutual 'I had a mix tape years ago, what the hell was that song' trouble. '93 in college a buddy made me a killer mix tape. I lost the runway list afterwards many moves, but have managed to chase downwards near all of the songs except 1. Here's what I remember:

"The song begins with a prune of a British man calling bingo. He mentions i number and so says 'blue? 22. We have a bingo- in 2 places.' So it cuts into the vocal. That is all I remember. I tin tell you it was '93 or prior. Any help from the proficient folks who follow you would exist fantastic."

Sound clues: none. This time there's neither a recorded snippet nor any indication in the OP's wording nigh what type of music information technology is.

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

The search: I accept 2 facts—the bingo intro and a release date no afterward than 1993—and one supposition: that the creative person is British, since there's no obvious reason for a non-U.k. creative person to source a few seconds of audio from a British bingo hall. Of course there's no guarantee that the song's championship has bingo in information technology, but that'southward the only practical starting point.

Searching Rails Title for "bingo" yielded 2,848 results. I filtered those down to items released in the U.k. (since odds are good that an creative person's piece of work would be released showtime and foremost in their native country), which narrowed the results to 562. I applied a second filter in order to see merely items released in the 1990s, which reduced the results to 143. Then I clicked on the View options at the upper-right of the window to run across the results as Text With Covers, which enabled me to run across the release year for each particular.

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

Since the release folio featured a YouTube video of the full anthology and "Bingo" was track nine of twelve, I scrubbed well-nigh 3/4 of the way into it, pausing at the gaps betwixt songs since I was interested only in the beginning of any given track, and at the 21:32 mark is where I found my British bingo player. All told, this process took me less than 30 minutes.

I idea I was done, but something nagged at me: YouTube also has a standalone video of but the song "Bingo", and that spoken word prune doesn't appear in it at all, either at the beginning or the finish. Further, the song in that video isn't the one following the bingo hall clip in the total-album video!

After calculation up the track times seen on the Discogs page, I realized that 21:32 into the album puts you at the end of "Bingo," not the beginning of it. Therefore, if the OP is seeking the song that comes subsequently the clip, information technology'southward really the next track on the anthology—"Ichola Buddha"—that'south he's afterwards (and, when making the mixtape, his friend may have mistaken the bingo hall clip for the intro to that song instead of what information technology actually is: the tail end of "Bingo").

Obviously my method is dependent on sure factors—not to mention some luck and intuition—and won't piece of work in every example, but I hope information technology'll be a useful tool to help yous get closer to solving your own mystery song. If information technology does, I'd love to hear your stories almost where and when yous originally came past a song, where the search took yous over time, and how you arrived at a solution.

(cassette photo by Laurent Hoffmann)

nevinregged.blogspot.com

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

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