For the past 17 years, armies of online sleuths around the world have relentlessly tried to unravel the title of what has been dubbed “the most mysterious song on the Internet.”
A serendipitous discovery provided them with the answer, when one intrepid researcher triumphantly reported his breakthrough on the online forum Reddit. It’s called “Subways of Your Mind,” and it was recorded by a little-known 1980s German band called FEX.
Michael Herdrich, 68, who played keyboards and guitar and sang backing vocals in FEX, told Der Spiegel that his former band members were “completely devastated” by the news of the death.
The band was unaware of the online phenomenon, he admitted.
How was the mystery solved?
The mystery began in 2007. The German brother and sister originally recorded the song on a radio cassette as teenagers and uploaded the digitized version online. As Rolling Stone reported in 2019, the tape contained most of the songs by popular bands like XTC and The Cure, but it contained one particular song that remained a mystery until now. .
The German brothers asked for help identifying it, and audiophiles soon took up the challenge.
The song wasn’t listed on any music database, but online sleuths tried to figure out what instruments could be heard and analyze the lead singer’s accent.
Initial attempts to identify the song were quickly categorized by many as belonging to the 1980s “new wave” genre, but with little success.
It was only when the track was uploaded to Reddit in 2019 that global interest exploded.
A Reddit subforum called “r/TheMysteriousSong” had tens of thousands of members, and the raid was reported in German and other media.
A big breakthrough was finally made earlier this week when a user named “marijn1412” said he identified the song as “Subways of Your Mind.”
He said he met the former FEX members while researching an event for up-and-coming bands organized by a public broadcaster in northern Germany in the 1980s.
The Reddit user wrote that after contacting the four-piece members from the northern city of Kiel, they were sent a version of the mysterious song, revealing the title of the song they had been searching for for years.
Marijn1412 wrote: “After I emailed him back saying that this song was actually a very famous ‘lost song,’ he asked me not to make it public until he spoke to his old bandmates. But in the meantime the song became known.” It was registered with GEMA (German performance rights organization) and people found out about it, but the band members agreed that I should publish it. I’m glad you did. ”
Hardlich, who is still a musician, told Der Spiegel that this was the first time he had heard about the large-scale search operation.
“I thought it was amazing that someone was interested in the music of a band from over 40 years ago that had only regional success, if any at all,” he said.
Heydrich, who lives in Munich, said the band’s members now want to reissue “Subways of Your Mind” and are trying to track down the original recording of the song.
Their success may have been decades in the making, but “for us, it came out of the blue,” he said.
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