Needles in Haystacks: The Lostwave Story

In one internet subculture, people desperately try to find the origins of songs without attribution. Sometimes they strike gold. Sometimes they get lost in the cyber-void

Earlier this year, I spoke with Paula Toledo about her whirlwind 15 minutes of fame. Toledo made music in the 2000s that never got too big, and then moved on with her life. The problem? Nobody on the internet could move on. Unbeknownst to Toledo, people online had accidentally stumbled upon her songs and had spent a decade trying to find her.

Catherine Sinow, a frequent contributor to this newsletter, first told me about the Paula Toledo saga while working on a different story about how Jessica Simpson released 500 versions of her song “A Public Affair”. Toledo was just the tip of the iceberg, though. This week Sinow brings another story about how people online have been searching and finding lost songs at a quicker rate than ever before.

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Needles in Haystacks: The Lostwave Story

By Catherine Sinow

Somewhere between 1982 and 1984, a German teenager named Darius taped a post-punk song off the radio. He never wrote the name of the song or the artist down, and to this day both remain unknown. This song sounds as post-punk as a post-punk song can be, with a tight 4/4 time signature, melancholic atmosphere, and a prominent bass line paired with a thin, metallic guitar. Like a lot of classic 1980s vocalists, the singer also has a deep and commanding voice.

In 2007 – yes, 20 years later – Lydia, the sister of that German teenager Darius, started posting about that post-punk song online in search of answers. Very little happened for the next decade until a third, non-familial person named Gabriel created the subreddit /r/TheMysteriousSong in 2019. Since then, thousands of people have been rabidly searching for said song.

Searchers have tried everything from tracking down the members of obscure bands from the 1980s to digging through radio archives. In fact, 291 leads have been catalogued in an old spreadsheet. Thus far, they have determined the synthesizer probably used on the song – a Yamaha DX-7 – along with a few other details. And meanwhile, people have paid tribute to the existing recording by creating lyrical interpretations, covers, guitar tabs, and sharing dreams they’ve had about the song.

Hallucinations from the search for the most mysterious song on the internet. Another user had a dream that the song was by the nonexistent band “The Stowaways.”

Around the same time the subreddit was created, the podcast Reply All released “The Case of the Missing Hit.” It follows a man who vividly remembers a song from the 1990s that also seems to be untraceable. The podcast host goes through ridiculous feats to find the song, to the point of recreating the song in a studio with a live band and showing the recreation to rock music critics. Although not affiliated with The Mysterious Song, this podcast episode dovetails with it perfectly. It gave mainstream legitimacy to the “Lostwave” movement.

The concept of missing songs has been around for as long as music. Songs from phonograph cylinders are poorly archived and documented, not to mention that playing the cylinders degrades them. Lost media is as old as media. Shakespeare himself has two plays, Love’s Labours Won and The History of Cardenio, that are lost to time. And reconstructing lost Dr. Who episodes is its own subculture. But the explosion of The Mysterious Song, symbolically bolstered by the Reply All episode, was the beginning of the modern Lostwave movement. As it turns out, people have been itching to find the origins of all kinds of songs. Today we see missing tracks attain online fandoms and inspire search parties on Reddit and Discord. And sometimes, people really do find the songs.

In the Information Age, it’s simple to find the name of a song. If you hear something you like while out and about, you can pull out your phone and try to Shazam it while it’s still playing. If you know the lyrics, you can Google them. And if all else fails, the subreddit /r/tipofmytongue has been known to solve difficult song questions, such as this Jeff Buckley song found with only a vague description and misheard lyrics to go off of. 

A Redditor identified this vague song memory as “Grace” by Jeff Buckley

What did people do before all our modern song finding technology? I asked my dad. “You were shit outta luck!” he said. “You could ask the person who was playing it, or maybe figure it out based on what the music sounded like. Back then there wasn’t as much music available, so that was possible. Now we have access to millions of songs on streaming.”

Whether it’s before the invention of recorded music, the days of pure vinyl, or the information overload of the internet, one thing has always been true. When all your typical search options are out, the only option left is to search like a maniac and see if other people care to help you.

The Lifecycle of a Lostwave

Many Lostwave communities follow a predictable pattern. The songs all acquire a placeholder title. For example, one song fragment was dubbed “Egyptian Wife” after one of its lyrics. Turns out its real title was “Nefertiti”, named after an ancient Egyptian queen. Sometimes, the placeholder title turns out to be the real title too, as was the case with “Sexy Lady” by Joy Em.

Songs often acquire a symbolic image, which serves to encapsulate the desperation, hope, and admiration dripping from so many Lostwave posts. They are often random pictures that come with YouTube uploads. For example, “Everyone Knows That” was associated with a pink boombox, and “How Long Will It Take” was illustrated with a teddy bear staring at the ocean.

The “Everyone Knows That” boombox, used on a YouTube upload. It’s the Nextplay Glitz and Glitter Boombox from 2006.

Communities will often follow ridiculous leads for lack of better ones. These leads are often dead ends, and some seem a lot like hoaxes. For a while, the “Everyone Knows That” community was following a lead claiming that the song was played in a Polish McDonald’s.

A lot of the posts on the subreddits are slush made up of speculation and fan tributes. Any semi-promising artist leads get their Instagram inboxes blown up, despite searchers with more self-control telling the loose lips to knock it off. If the songs are found, there’s an outpouring of hype, discussion, and fan art, often followed by the slowdown of posts on the subreddits. It’s sad to see—in ways it feels like “using” the artist as online mystery fodder and then sending them on a bizarre 15-minutes-of-fame rollercoaster.

We’re Living in a Golden Age

In late 2023, a lot of Lostwave songs started getting found – rapidly. People started throwing around the term “Golden Age of Lostwave.”

It started on December 3, 2023 with the identification of a Lostwave nicknamed “Kenya Dance.” Back in 2013, a video called “HOW TO PICK UP WOMEN IN 30 DIFFERENT CULTURES” used a four-second snippet of an African-sounding song for the “Kenya” portion. Creator Joji – formerly known as Filthy Frank – had no idea where he got it, the assumption being he googled “African music” and grabbed something random. After ten years, YouTuber nbduckman created an informational video about the song accompanied by a $300 bounty. One day later, a viewer found the song by searching “east Ugandan gospel before:2013.” It turned out to be a Christian worship song called “Katonda Alinawe” by David SonJC. It wasn’t from Kenya, but rather from its western neighbor Uganda.

One of the most bizarrely personal stories to come out of Lostwave’s golden streak was “The World Was So Easy.” It originated with a Canadian man named Ethan McIntyre and his baby video from 1995. The footage was mistakenly taped over with two seconds of a music video. It featured a cheery power pop song and a man in suspenders blissfully jamming on a guitar. As the mystery bothered him for his entire life, McIntyre brought it to the Lostwave scene in 2021. He posted the two-second clip on YouTube and later a longer baby video excerpt after requests. 

The Lostwavers slowly untangled the mystery. The logo in the corner of the video was for Canada’s New Country Network. The guitar was a Parker Fly. Even the quilt in the background was identified. In February of 2024, a Reddit user asked a member of Canadian band Sloan if he was familiar with the song. He identified it right away. The song was “Just Passin’ By” by The Big Picture. Frankly, it’s an amazing, complex track with an immersive music video.

The biggest Lostwave “hit” since The Mysterious Song was a 17-second clip dubbed “Everyone Knows That.” It’s an infectiously catchy, funky song that sounds distinctively mid ‘80s. Posted originally on the website WatZatSong, the poster claimed it was left over from “learning how to capture audio.” While he stopped answering people’s questions, others got invested. A lot of people speculated it was a song from a TV movie or by a fictional band in a TV show. Others thought it might be from an erotic film. In April 2024, that last theory turned out to be correct. The full song, discovered in the 1986 movie Angels of Passion, was full of moaning. The 17-second clip from WatZatSong was taken directly from the movie, the only section of the song without sex sounds.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Plenty of other Lostwave songs were found around the same time. A synthpop track called “Fond My Mind” was actually “Feels Like a Wish” by Brazilian artist Station K. An alternative rock song called “La Cancion De Alicia” was discovered to be “Dreams 4ever” by the Chilean band Bad Influence. A Cranberries-style song originally heard on a pirated DVD menu – and covered two times in this newsletter – turned out to be by a Canadian singer-songwriter named Paula Toledo.

The speed at which these songs have been found is incredible. It’s a domino effect, with the identification of “Kenya Dance” setting off so many other discoveries. It’s hard to say exactly why this is happening, but here’s a theory: finding “Kenya Dance”, a four-second long clip with lyrics in a language unfamiliar to most, was massively inspiring. It showed people that with some clever Googling and hopeful perseverance, a mystery you desperately want to solve could be at arm’s length.

Golden Age of Lostwave finds as catalogued by portfa-mi-reina on Reddit

Non-music mysteries have been getting solved as well. The composer who wrote the Disney Channel jingle was unknown until the YouTube channel Defunctland made an investigative documentary about it. A guy spent $800 to buy a photocopy of a photocopy of the script of the lost Seinfeld episode “The Bet.” A man searched for decades for the photo that inspired the cover of Rio by Duran Duran. He only found it after spending countless hours and thousands of dollars ordering magazines off eBay. Similarly, several years ago, a fabric with eight celebrities on it took an internet community by storm. Seven were easy to identify – they were mid-2000s superstars – but one, dubbed “Celebrity Number Six,” took four years to find. She was a retired model from Spain named Leticia Sardá. The find made national news, with the New York Times and AV Club chiming in.

A Deeply Human Impulse

All media becomes lost without intervention. It only stays at our fingertips if it’s archived, often by librarians and historians, but also amateurs. Preservation is connected to curiosity, a deeply human emotion found in everything from Marco Polo traversing the globe to Lostwavers trawling through old radio archives. Lost media movements are a beautiful testament to humanity’s love for details, chasing the unknown, and writing the history of things once deemed throwaways.

Lostwave also seems to draw roots from collaborative harmony that blossoms in the wholesome corners of the internet. One of the most stunning examples is Reddit’s “Place” activity where millions of people drew on a canvas at the same time and managed to coordinate a brilliant tapestry of images. Lots of true crime cases have been solved with crowdsourced knowledge, such as the identification of a deceased Grateful Dead fan who had been nameless for 17 years. We also can’t forget user-created repositories of knowledge like Wikipedia and Rate Your Music.

The most recent result of Reddit’s periodic “Place” activity.

Nobody wants everything to be archived and at one’s fingertips. Imagine if every single radio traffic report was painstakingly archived—not too many people would be that desperate to get their hands on them. And would you be happy if you were like the people in Black Mirror S1E3 who could replay anything they saw through a brain implant? Probably not. A lot of Lostwaves feel piercing and mystical. They transcend their status as marginalia and become objects of desire. They often sound of their time – yes, and the movement is partially driven by the concept of nostalgia – but it’s their ethereal beauty that keeps people coming back.

After five years of searching under a cloud cover of hopelessness, the successes from the Golden Age of Lostwave have kept the original Mysterious Song community going. No, they are not much closer to identifying the song than five years ago. But the hope is strong.

Recently, people have been looking into the many little indie bands that played at a 1984 iteration of the German music festival Hörfest. And hyper-intelligent researcher Successful-Bread-347 is confident that the song was broadcasted on one of two days in fall of 1984. 

Actually seeing lost media found is incredible, but for me, the best part is the magic that happens in the days and weeks before. There’s a feeling of acceleration in the air. I think The Mysterious Song is going to be found very soon. Let’s enjoy the mystery while it lasts.

A New One
"World on a String" by Jessica Pratt
2024 - Contemporary Folk

Recently a friend offloaded some Jessica Pratt tickets onto me when she couldn’t make the show. I had previously enjoyed her first album, but I hadn’t listened to it in 9 years. Pratt opened the show with “World on a String”, and it was clear that she had grown as an artist since her first album. What’s so addictive about this song is how deeply satisfying the chorus feels.

An Old One
"Crawl to Me" by The Opposition
1990 - Sophistipop

I’ve done a little looking for Lostwave songs to no avail. Nevertheless, during my searches I often discover other obscure music. While looking for “Everyone Knows That”, I found an album by a post-punk band that decided to do a 180 and make a sophisti-pop record. The result should be just as famous as Steve McQueen by Prefab Sprout, Hats by the Blue Nile, and Avalon by Roxy Music. But The Opposition clearly had no marketing team behind them. Though the song’s double bass and melodica, along with a lyric about cherry cola, make it feel very clever, it’s the passionate delivery that keeps you hooked.

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This week’s newsletter was written by Catherine Sinow. Sinow lives in Oregon where she is studying to be a mental health counselor. Her writing typically focuses on obscure and unusual topics in music. She would like to specifically thank her friend Marcel for sending her a Lostwave playlist and deepening her interest in the topic.