Whatever I Do I Want You Back I Want You Back Again British Artist

Information technology's pretty common in music circles to run into 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. There are entire communities—on websites like Wat Zat Song?, Midomi, and Reddit—devoted to crowdsourcing the solutions.

Many times, without what felt similar much piece of work, I've been able to successfully ID such songs for strangers. Non because I'm Brainypants McMusicface; to the contrary. In every example these have been songs and artists I'd never heard (or even heard of) earlier.

Only the recordings contained the necessary clues and context, to which I practical some deductive reasoning and inquiry done on freely-available websites. Here'south how I've gone virtually it, in example crowdsourcing isn't working for you.

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

Can you ID this funky post-punk song taped off WNYU in the '80s?

A Slicing Up Eyeballs reader sent us the following annotation:

"I write from Germany and then 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 Song there but did not hear the Name and Creative person. So i take the Link here where you lot can listen to. If you don`t know it, maybe you can assistance usa with the Lyrics. We went them up and downwards with no Result. Specially subsequently the start words "Oh well oh welcome ….. This might exist the Refrain of the Song because he repeats it often in this Song. I would be very glad to get an reply from y'all because this Vocal is searched for more than 33 Years."

The post was accompanied by the vocal's sound on Soundcloud (and had already been an open up case on Wat Zat Vocal? for over v 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) Championship.

Since this vocal didn't accept a traditional chorus (where the title would unremarkably echo), 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 [love / life]

And so something about napalm? Sounds a fleck agit-prop. That showtime line repeats at the beginning of each poesy, giving at to the lowest degree role 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 song titles (i.e. "oh", "well" and "welcome" might announced in 3 unlike song titles on a given album, not necessarily all in the aforementioned song title).

ii. 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 too. Choosing Decade>1980 from the card down the left side of the search window narrows it downwardly from 44 to 7.

As 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 plain weren't the genre I was looking for (i.e. skip over the items with "gospel" and "soul" in the titles, as well as the "Hot Hits" compilation. If this song had e'er been a hot hit, someone would have identified it by now). That left me with only one upshot to investigate:Maxi Trip the light fantastic toe Pool Vol. 2 – Musikladen Eurotops.

NB: Discogs, due to the mode its records are structured, returned three different iterations of this same album in the search results: one being the 'chief page' for that release/album and the other two detailing the carve up formats of the release, CD and LP. All three are interchangeable for my purposes, so no need to look at each.

3. Use streaming music resources to follow leads.

Given that my keywords were spread beyond two track titles on this compilation—"Oh Well" (by an artist of the same name), and another titled "Welcome, Motorcar Gun"—and that my vocal inappreciably seemed like club fodder, this was probably a expressionless end simply 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's discography. The vocal "Oh Well", since it was released as a single, had its ain subpage with an embedded YouTube video, a quick scan of which proved it wasn't the vocal I was subsequently.

"Machine gun" didn't appear in the lyrics of my vocal, so it seemed illogical to assume that the latter song had any relevance to my search. Dorsum to the cartoon lath.

iv. Repeat steps one-iii every bit needed.

I didn't bother pursuing the words "oh well" whatever further considering, on their own, they just 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 plough of phrase the claw on which to hang a song, and so it had a meliorate chance of actualization in the title. Only that search yielded just ii 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 downwards to just the '80s nevertheless left nigh 2700 releases. Scanning the commencement folio of 50 results, I eliminated anything immediately recognizable (e.g. T. Rex'southward "Telegram Sam"), the foreign linguistic communication items, the ones evidently in non-applicable genres similar jazz, and ones in which Sam was inextricably paired with other words ("Play It Over again, Sam", etc.).

At the lesser of the folio my heart was fatigued to a dark, arty record cover 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 single 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 Great britain release from 1981, classified as New Wave. On this blazon of page, Discogs displays suggestions of like artists; while I wasn't intimately familiar with the ones listed here (Josef Grand, Cabaret Voltaire), I knew plenty to think they were reasonably aligned with my target.

I searched YouTube for "Rhythm of Life Uncle Sam," which returned one event; afterwards a brief drum intro that was missing from the original postal service, 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 so close together as to audio like one give-and-take.

[Editor'southward note: that video used to be embedded right hither and so that y'all could hear it, just has since been removed from YouTube and not replaced. In fact, Rhythm of Life'southward "Uncle Sam" appears not to be available on whatsoever legitimate streaming service—or for digital download—in the Usa, and can merely exist establish on a ii-CD Paul Haig compilation from Brussels-based Les Disques du Crépuscule characterization. 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 exist.]

To be off-white, intuition played a part in arriving at the solution, equally did practiced luck; if my song had appeared on the 50th page of "Sam" results instead of the first, would I have found it? (Not to mention other factors in my favor: that the vocal 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 cognition, etc.) Still, 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'due south ane more example off the meridian of my caput, using the same steps—identifying the audio clues, lyrical clues, and parameters for the search.

Example #2

Audio clues: a song taped off an American alt radio station in 1988. The artist sounded American, slightly roots-rockish merely 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 affair to a chorus, the just lyrics which repeat are variations of:

Whatever name you lot go by, she goes by 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 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's what I was hearing, every bit opposed to the oh-oh-ohs simply being vocal punctuations. Beingness catchy and unique, it was the virtually obvious hook. And radio being a contemporary medium, the song was probably either released in '87 or '88; songs generally don't get airplay years later their release unless they've achieved some condition. Searching Discogs in 2 fields—Track Title for "35,000", and Yr for 1987—took me straight to it: "35,000" by Insiders, from an anthology chosen Ghost On the Embankment.

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

Example #three, without audio

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 have on a mixtape. Does this band a bell for anyone?

"I accept what seems to be the common 'I had a mix tape years agone, what the hell was that song' problem. '93 in college a buddy fabricated me a killer mix record. I lost the runway list after many moves, but have managed to hunt downwardly almost all of the songs except 1. Hither'southward what I remember:

"The song begins with a clip of a British man calling bingo. He mentions 1 number and so says 'blue? 22. We have a bingo- in TWO places.' Then it cuts into the vocal. That is all I recollect. I can tell you it was '93 or prior. Any help from the good folks who follow y'all would be fantastic."

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

Lyrical clues: only the spoken 'bingo' intro. At this point, I don't fifty-fifty know whether the residue of the song has lyrics or is purely instrumental.

The search: I have two facts—the bingo intro and a release appointment no later than 1993—and one assumption: that the artist is British, since at that place'due south no obvious reason for a non-United kingdom artist to source a few seconds of sound from a British bingo hall. Of course there's no guarantee that the song's title has bingo in it, simply that's the only practical starting point.

Searching Track Title for "bingo" yielded two,848 results. I filtered those down to items released in the Uk (since odds are skilful that an artist'south piece of work would be released first and foremost in their native country), which narrowed the results to 562. I applied a second filter in order to see simply 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 meet the results as Text With Covers, which enabled me to see the release year for each particular.

Ignoring anything released past 1993, I worked my mode down the first folio of fifty results, clicking through to each item's detailed release folio and looking up songs on YouTube (if they weren't already embedded in the Discogs page). Eventually I arrived at the anthology Achieve by Snuff, released in 1992.

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

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

After adding upwardly the track times seen on the Discogs page, I realized that 21:32 into the album puts yous at the end of "Bingo," not the beginning of it. Therefore, if the OP is seeking the vocal that comes after the clip, it'due south actually the next rails on the album—"Ichola Buddha"—that'southward he'due south after (and, when making the mixtape, his friend may accept mistaken the bingo hall clip for the intro to that song instead of what information technology really 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 instance, just I hope it'll be a useful tool to assist you lot go closer to solving your own mystery song. If it does, I'd love to hear your stories about where and when you originally came by a vocal, where the search took you over time, and how yous arrived at a solution.

(cassette photo by Laurent Hoffmann)

smithwormithe.blogspot.com

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

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