Reply All - #158 The Case of the Missing Hit

Episode Date: March 5, 2020

A man in California is haunted by the memory of a pop song from his youth. He can remember the lyrics and the melody. But the song itself has vanished, completely scrubbed from the internet. PJ takes on the Super Tech Support case. Further Listening: Christian Lee Hutson’s music : https://open.spotify.com/track/3g8nKpXsQtXv0lcN4UGVGs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is for Ply-all. I'm PJ Vote. And I'm Alex Golden. So, Alex. Mm-hmm. I'm going to tell you a story that I think you sort of remember, but maybe don't know all the details of. Okay. So last spring, I went to a therapist because I was having a hard time with a bunch of stuff.

And I was complaining to this therapist. And I'm just like so obsessed with this. I can't something about this. And the therapist said something to me that no therapist has ever said before. He was like, have you ever considered the idea that you might have an OCD? Yes, I do remember this. And at the time, I was like, I definitely don't. Like, whatever else is going on with me, I definitely don't have OCD.

Like, there's no part of my life that's about compulsive neatness or order. Like, I'm a, like, walking pig pen. I can attest to the truthfulness of that statement. But what the guy said, he was like, well, there's a kind of OCD called Pure O where you don't really have noticeable, visible compulsions. Instead, you're just extremely, extremely obsessive. Okay. That comports with the person that I know.

Yes. So he gave me the test. I was off the charts. And like it was one of those moments. It was really helpful because there were all these parts of my personality that I've kind of struggled with that all of a sudden. It's like finding your horoscope kind of. Like there are so many times in my life where somebody was like, oh, why don't you just stop thinking about it? Why don't you let it go?

Why don't you get over? Why do you not just not look at that? And I've always been like, you're joking. But then there's this other thing that happens where someone. Sometimes my brain just locks on to things that don't matter at all. Like, things are just small and stupid. Like, I was talking to somebody the other day about this sci-fi book I'd read as a kid, and I tried to remember the name, and I couldn't remember the name.

And I was like, oh, this is the rest of my day. The rest of my day is trying to remember the name of this book, and my brain will not change the channel until I do. What was the book? That you're the eye and the arm, thank God. But, but, but like, I know everybody experiences that. I experience it, I swear to God, much more deeply. Okay.

I'm saying this to you because the story that I want to tell you this week, it's about a man who's living in exactly that hell. Like, the hell of having something stuck on the tip of your tongue that just will not go away. I felt like I was uniquely qualified to help him. And so I tried. The story is a super tech support. So this week, our listener with an unusually thorny technical problem is a guy named Tyler Gillette. So I am, I live in Los Angeles.

I am an artist, a film director. I was very intrigued by your email. I can't overstate how much this has driven me crazy. Tell me about the problem. So the problem began, this was probably, I don't know, this was a couple months ago now. I was leaving a dinner party with my wife. I think it was a holiday party. and I had had a couple of beers

and we're driving back to our place and as I tend to do, I'm trying to get her attention, make her laugh. And I'm singing this song that's stuck in my head. And she's asking me like, what is this? What is this weird song you're singing?

And so I was like, you don't know this song? This is like a huge thing in the 90s. I can't believe you don't know this song. So I pull my phone out to try to find it so that I can put it on Bluetooth and we can listen to it on the drive home. And I can't find a single lyric to this song.

I can't figure out, you know, who made it. Nothing, no information anywhere on Google about about this song. And the next, you know, the next 10, 15 minutes of our drive home is, is quiet because I'm just sort of sitting in the passenger seat, like frantically searching for this for this song. And I eventually get home. It's like, you know, 10, 30, 11 o'clock at night. And she's like, well, I'm going to bed. And I was like, well, cool, I'm going to stay up. I got to figure this thing out. And I'm awake for the next like three. a half hours on Google. And every time I searched something new and found another dead end, I was getting increasingly

frustrated, but also kind of scared. Like, it started to dawn on me that there was something, that there was something really bizarre happening. It just, it felt almost like he'd found like a hole in the world, like a glitch. He said it wasn't like this was the best song in the world. Like, that wasn't the problem. The way he described it, he said it's a song where it's like the choruses are kind of in the style of you too.

but the verses are very bare naked ladies. So far, you're selling me like a song that I really don't want to listen to. Well, don't worry, you can't. But just the point is not whether or not it's a good song. The point is that because Tyler couldn't find it, he just could not let go with this thing. I would wake up in the middle of the night

with a new lyric in my head and I'd go to my computer and write it down and then go back to bed. Like, these lyrics were kind of like filtering into my brain because the lyrics of this song are not ambiguous lyrics. Like, there are a million and one things that you should be able to just type into Google and it immediately pull up, you know, the right song. And instead, Google was returning these, like, wildly literal search results.

Like, one of the lyrics is better than a sultan for a bride or something like that. And I'm searching this, and it's just pulling up pictures of, like, royalty, you know, like, sultans and royalty and their family. I'm like, this is the weirdest thing that there's absolutely nothing on the internet about this song. Does he know how he remembered the lyrics so clearly? Was it a song he heard a lot? Yeah, it's a song that he said, like, he would have heard a lot in, like, junior high, high school era

when he was growing up in Arizona. Okay. Which also means that he has remembered the song with what I have to say is a remarkable amount of clarity for over two decades. So the intro, the kind of intro to measures, it's like this, do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do.

Do do do do do do do do do. I think it's played on, I think it's like a flute. And the whole kind of concede of the song is better than, like, better than a, you know, and then they sort of rattle off a bunch of a bunch of things. Like, yeah, you're better than the day when the mona with the G string, better than the promise of a good one night feeling, better than the, you know, it's like just sort of quick, it's very bare naked lady'sy, right? And then there's sort of, and then the chorus is this like, share your love with me tonight.

I want to feel that love, which is like kind of you too. it has this sort of grand like arena arena sound to it you know yeah well and it's catchy even like your rendition of it like it's it's like it has like Nokia ringtone yeah there's like an earwormy an earwormy quality to it for sure

this is the this I'm like you don't recognize that no nobody recognize this so the next thing Tyler did to solve this it was such a It was such a desperate attempt at a solution. So Tyler's not a musician, but he decided to try to record the song on his own using like Adobe Premiere because he's a filmmaker. So he recorded like a multi-track version of it where he is doing every single instrument. With his mouth? With his mouth.

Do you want to hear what he made? I absolutely do. Okay. This is truly inspired. Long before I held you. in my dreams. You came and captured my imagination. Those some things are never what they seem.

I'll never have to worry because I know you are. I hate to say it, but one of the reasons this doesn't help much is because he's not necessarily like a natural-born singer. No, he would be the first of a business. Share your love with me tonight. Now, now, now, now, now, no, now, no, no, no, no. Oh, Tyler. I want to feel that love. It reminds me of a lot of bad 90s songs.

It does remind me of Chiggity China, the Chinese chicken. Which is actually called One Week by Bear Naked Ladies. Chickadee China, the Chinese chicken. Stop sticking Watching X-Files With no lights on With all our mazons I hope the smoky man's in this one

My house It reminds me of Savage Garden Do you remember that best? I guess the chorus is Bada da-da-dab like a cherry-cola You know that fucking song? No Bad song

My eyes and I am taken to A bit of crystal Mine a magenta Fianna chicken shelter In the face of my spy Straight like a chicken cherry cola Yeah it's like there was a moment In the mid to late 90s

Where white alt rock bands Had to have Sort of like the cadence of rapping in their songs, and this, like, belongs to that moment. Yeah. Well, Tyler, sorry this is in your head. An additional thing that just makes this very frustrating and confusing is that Tyler's 100% sure that this song was a pop song.

He says as a kid, he didn't listen to anything that was obscure or indie. He says his taste of music was just completely mainstream. Right. So whatever this was, it was something, like, big. On the radio. So it shouldn't have disappeared. Yeah, I mean, there are regional hits. I had the same theory.

You know, maybe this was just big in Arizona. But the one thing he found on the internet was a post on a forum called strattococon. Which is for Stratocaster fans, the guitar. I'm familiar with the guitar. So it's a post by a guy who goes by Piazo Man. And this guy on the forum had posted this question. That basically was like, this song was in my head, but I can't find it. anywhere on Google.

And then on this forum post, he lists some of the lyrics, and they're the same. The lyrics are similar enough that they are definitely from the same song that I am remembering. And he even went as far as to play the sort of intro, like the first two measures

of the intro on his guitar, and posted it on YouTube. The thing about this guy is he's posting from Trinidad and Tobago. Oh, okay. Not a regional hit. Not a regional hit. Like somehow this song was heard by Piazo Man, who is in Trinidad and Tobago, and Tyler, who's in Flagstaff, Arizona, but then completely wiped from the internet. Tyler had already tried messaging Piazo Man on the forum. No luck. I tried also. No luck either.

So Tyler's next step had then been to take the song he'd made, and then he tried to plug it into this app called Soundhound. Soundhound is like Shazam, except the idea with Soundhound is supposedly you can just sing a melody into the app and it's supposed to be able to recognize the song. That's really cool. Yeah, so he tried that. It hadn't worked. So that's when I came up with a plan on my own, which was this. I was going to fly to Los Angeles, get Tyler into the studio, and then just make a way higher quality, way more accurate version of the song from his memory. And then we can take that copy, plug it into Soundhound, and then we'll have it.

So that was the plan. After the break, Los Angeles. Welcome back to the show. Okay, so a couple weeks ago, my friend Christian Lee Hudson, who's a singer-songwriter in L.A., He basically put together a band for me. Just a bunch of great musicians he knows, who he said would be willing to help me with this project. Hey.

Hey. How's it going? Hey. I met them on a Sunday morning in a parking lot of this recording studio called United Recording in Hollywood. The band, I would describe them as cool in an unintimitating way. They were just a gang of really smiley dudes. Hey, PJ. Hey, PJ.

What's up? Should we go in? Yeah. Yeah. Hi. Hey, how you doing? It is this studio B? Studio B?

Hey, how you doing, man? So we walked in the studio, and everybody's like, oh, God. This place was just uncomfortably fancy. Like, this was a studio that Frank Sinatra built in Los Angeles. Okay. I started thinking about the band that actually recorded the song. Like, did they get to use a studio that's nice to do it? It's a beautiful, like, wood paneled, like, the walls had all the records that were made there,

and it's like, Michael Jackson's, they're like, Mariah Carey. I think of all the things that have been reported here and know. And no. They felt so fast. We're joking. I was starting to get a little bit queasy at that moment, just because we were in a really nice recording studio. There was four musicians.

There was an engineer. Just like, what business do I have trying to recreate a song off of some guy's memory? And that is the moment when Tyler shows up, the guy with the song in his head. Hey, Tyler. Nice to meet you in person. How's it going? How's it going? So we go to the control room.

They're like, hey, we've got like a runner if you guys need snacks or anything, which is a guy who works with this to you who goes to get you snacks. I didn't know that there was such a thing. I didn't know either. Anyway, Tyler, me, all the musicians, we gather around in a semicircle. I recite the plan. So I'm a journalist and I make a podcast and sometimes we'll listeners have like problems. They want to help them.

Okay. So it feels like everyone's sort of enjoying the challenge of this, But nobody really thinks Tyler's going to remember the song well enough to really make something out of it. Like, we are taking a crappy, fossilized footprint of a dinosaur and trying to imagine and recreate the dinosaur from that footprint. So I take out my iPhone and I play Tyler's recording and show people what they'll be working with. Long before I held you in my dreams, you came and captured my imagination. Whatever what they seem, I'll never have to worry because I know you.

What is that song? I am thinking, it is reminding me of one particular song that's like, no, no, no, no kind of one, no, no, no, dude. Oh, that is the, no, no, no, no, that is the, is that one week? Yeah, okay. Yeah. So at this point, my friend Christian, the guy who'd gotten the band together, This is a moment where he realizes what he's got himself into.

He leans over to me and he goes, I'm going to have to sing this. Because Christian is a very talented musician, but it's true, the way he sings his songs. Sounds nothing like the dude from Bear Naked Pace. Yeah. So anyway, the band leaves the control room, goes in the live room, and they start warming up.

The crazy thing, the thing that I didn't expect, was that basically Tyler immediately transformed, into like a very confident music producer. Like he was running around, he was like, he was like, okay, guitar's gonna do this. Instead of a da-d-doo-do, not that run it, da-da-da-da. Like the symbols I think need to be a little more shimmery.

Like, bass is gonna do this. Is there a more, is there a sparser bass line? I know, yeah. It feels busy. Like there's something that feels like... He's like, you know, the guitar's supposed to a little more like edge guitar, like from you two. Is there a way to turn down the level of...

He was so specific in his musical instruction in a way that I would never have been able to be. It sounds like trying to make a police sketch. Yes, it's totally like a police sketch, except in this case, the dude who got mugged has perfect recall for people's faces. Like, Tyler started coaching the drummer, he started coaching the bassist, the guitarist who also played flute, and then he jumped in the vocal booth with Christian and was coaching him through vocals. I never what they seem. I never have to worry because I know you are. You were better than a lot.

Dude. Tyler was so high off the thrill of seeing the song come back to life. First of all, he made his wife come to the studio to see because he was like, this is real, this is real. You can see the song is real. And then he would like... Like in the middle of it, he called her. He called her and she came, she drove over to the studio.

And he was clutching his hair in his hands in like pure joy. And then he even actually actually... started remembering parts of the song that he'd forgotten. He was like, oh, you know, there's this guitar solo. Could we do the guitar solo? Do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do It goes back into this. I'm very, I'm very happy for Tyler.

I know. It felt great. It felt like we'd actually yanked this thing out of his memory and turned it into an actual roadmap we could actually use to find the real song. Do you want to hear it? Mm-hmm. Okay. Your buddy is such a trooper for actually saying these lyrics.

He kind of killed it. The guitars are shimmering. They're very much... The rhythm guitar shimmers. Is this a solo? So, then you ran it through the thing and you figured out what it was. We put it into Soundound. No result.

But we now had like a real version of the song. We could go play it for people. We could find somebody who recognized it. I had this feeling like I was carrying almost like an artifact in my pocket. Like we had plucked this song from whatever late 90s Napster graveyard it had been interred in. And it was ours now. You know, it was like having a baby triceratops in my pocket. So I figured the best place to take this would be to music critics.

So I called Brendan Klinkenberg. He's a senior editor at Rolling Stone. Okay, here we go. I do not know this song. Okay. I'm sorry. Let me, do you want me to grab some people like in a conference room? Yes.

Oh, my God, yes, please. I can get, there's a bunch of people who would be better suited to have heard this. Oh, my God. Thank you so much. Brennan was referring to the fact that he is 28, and there are a lot of, of critics at Rolling Stone who are older than 28. So he grabbed five of them. He said between them, there was over a hundred years

of pop music writing experience in one room. You're talking to the Rolling Stone Brain Trust. And we were young in this time period and listened to a lot of modern music like this. Yeah. So I played it for them? Nothing. No.

No. Nothing. Not at all. Not bringing any bells. They thought that because they didn't recognize the song, it actually meant the song probably didn't exist. That's either a super elaborate prank or something's very strange here, something's off and something's golf.

I mean, what do we know about the guy? Is he telling the truth? I mean, like, is he just... Does he work for a viral marketing company? Their honest to God, best guess was that this was a hoax, that Tyler was just lying to me. But I believe Tyler. So I went for a second opinion.

I called Jessica Hopper. She's a legendary music critic. She used to edit pitchfork. She ran MTV News. All right, here we go. Okay. Do you recognize this at all? Part of it.

Really? The like, the like, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Yeah. This song probably exists. Where did he live? He lived in Arizona. He lived in suburban Arizona, and he said he only listened to the radio and not cool radio. Mm.

Mm. I love this challenge. This is weird. And it was a man singing. Yeah. It was a rock band. So the one other place he found it on the internet when he looked, there was a post on a Stratocaster guitar forum, and that guy was in Trinidad and Tobago. It's a major label record.

Major label record? Yeah, because there's like no, there's like no indie record that would have like literally gotten around the world to weird places like that. It would have had to be something that was a charting hit. But then if it's a charting hit, how is it not on the internet? Fuck. Yeah. This is a real. Mewa Triangle.

Yes. They've both sailed through this song. Okay. Can you send me a copy of this? Yes, absolutely. Okay. So next person I tried was I emailed Robert Criscoe. You know who Robert Crisgow is?

Yeah. Like Dean of American Pop Music, where he was like... You contacted Robert Crisgow about this? I emailed Robert Crisgow about it. I was like, he's heard every pop song since 1967. So he told me to email in the song, which I did. And he said, you know, actually, the person who would really know this is Rob Sheffield, which was the same thing the Rolling Stone editors had said.

Everybody seems to agree that Rob Sheffield is the human encyclopedia of forgotten pop music. He would definitely know it. When it comes to terrible music from the vault of collective cultural memory, I'm the janitor with the broom. So can I play you this mess? Yes. Is this ringing any bell? No, it's not ringing any bells at all. I'd love to hear just like a bit of it again.

Yeah, let me play for you. Thank you. Something I picked up that I didn't pick up the first time. Yeah. Is the reference to Betty Page pictures. Yes. Which is like that's, that's, that's super specific. That's definitely late 90s.

That's definitely not early 90s. I would bet, you know, not a limb, I would bet a toe that it's 1997 to 99. What do I do? Have you tried like just, you know, walking from town to town with a ukulele? Knocking on doors? That feels like the punishment. That feels like what my sentence. So this is the point where my obsessive brain just

really dug its teeth in. Because despite all this work, not only was I know closer to finding the song, the song was winning. It had warmed itself in my brain so terribly. I actually realized it's been decades since I heard a pop song that I couldn't just immediately look up online to get out of my head. And it was like in the meantime, my brain's defenses had atrophied. Like during the day, it was kind of fine. Like I'd walk around humming the song. I'd see people in the hallways and sing lyrics to them. It was at night that it got really bad. I'd go home, I'd eat dinner, I'd get in bed, and I'd just lie there. Staring at the ceiling, the guitar solo, just 17 seconds of music looping in my head for hours, like till literally 3 a.m.

I have an obsessive brain. I'm used to obsessing over things. This was uniquely bad. It was just a melody. A melody and this question, which was starting to feel, frankly, infuriating. How, on God's Green Earth, can you have a hit radio song that actually just gets vaporized from history? And it wasn't just me. Like one of these nights, I got a text from Christian, the singer. He was also awake, also humming it to himself. Hello? Your brain is broken the way my brain is broken.

It's like Tyler has like a contagious disease. He's patient zero. And now we all have it. I talked to Jay and Max, who played on the session. I guess they had dinner the other night specifically to talk about the song because they both are having the same,

I guess the same thing that we're having where it just can't get it out of their heads. They're like, what? Something's so familiar about this. Wait, they met up to have dinner just to talk about the song? Yeah. That makes me feel so much less alone.

Man, I really hope that you figure this out. I know. So at this point, I kind of escalated things. I decided, obviously, I've been going about this all wrong. For whatever reason, this song had not reached the point where critics today still remembered it. And so I thought to myself, who is the person who would have been around back then, who the song definitely would have mattered to when it came out? And the only name I could really come up with was Stephen Page.

Stephen Page was the former frontman of the bare naked ladies. Okay, because my thinking was, everybody keeps saying that the verse of our mystery song sounds a lot like the verse of one week. If I had been the frontman for the band that did one week, I would have noticed the songs that sounded a lot like our song. So I called Stephen. Hello.

Hey, Stephen, how's it going? I'm great. How are you? I'm good. I'm calling you for a weird reason. Yeah. So Stephen was a lead singer of the Barnicke ladies back when they were writing songs like if I had a million dollars,

goofy pop songs that sold millions and millions of records. So first things first, I played in the song. Okay, here we go. There are elements in that that are very barrenaked ladies. And there are little things like there's the flute part. Like when we had a song Who Needs Sleep that had a flute thing in it like that. And then like in the chorus is the down, no, now on the guitar, which is like very, very naked ladies.

but that stuff is more bare naked ladies to me than the song itself. The song itself makes me go, oh, that's what people thought we sounded like. Oh, wow. So Stephen did not recognize the song. But he was actually able to help me with the mystery, that question of like, how does a pop song just disappear? He said that as somebody who was actually in the late 90s music scene, this completely made sense to him. Can you imagine the band that would have written this song? Oh yeah, there was an era there in that like whatever, 97 to 2002 where there were bands largely who had grown up in the bar scene who had this kind of mix of like the history of being a cover band who then morphed into a band who had originals.

And at that point, that was the absolute peak of the record industry, 1998 to 2000. What do you mean? That was when the record business made the most money in the history of the record business. It was the bubble. It was the real estate bubble or the dot-com bubble of the music business. The way Stephen described it, all this money pouring in, it actually made things feel really unsafe for musicians because the labels were just in full speculation mode.

They were treating the bands like penny stocks. So they were signing bands left, right, and center. Interesting. So it was like you, so it's totally an era that would support somebody who pops up, does one thing, and then you never hear from them again. Yeah. It's also possible, too, that sometimes these bands, would have a song or two

that they would test on some radio stations and they'd never get the record deal or they'd get the record deal and the album would never come out because the song wasn't. Yeah, it'd be kind of like, you know, demoing a stuff. They'd be doing a test market,

doing some research they would call it, doing research on a record. So you'd write the single, you'd record the single, you'd get mixed engineer, they'd play it on the radio and then if people didn't respond to it in like Flagstaff, Arizona,

it just disappeared? Sometimes that was the case or the record would come out not get any promotion. But stuff might seem like it's a hit when you just happen to be hearing it a few times while it's being tested in your market.

That's so strange. God, for those bands, it must have been so hard. Oh, God. I know so many bands, so many great bands, too, who, you know, record, you know, were in debt up to their ears with the record company, and the record company would either

not put the record out eventually or they'd put it out and dump it and they get dropped, and then they'd be seen as a band that got dropped, and it was hard to get second chances then. So this band could have been one of those. It is fully possible the song was played on the radio, but never actually released,

which would explain why it never made it onto the internet. This was the first person I spoke to who actually had a working theory for how Tyler could have heard the song a million times on the radio, but then also how the song could have just disappeared. And Stephen had an idea for how to find this. song. Which is? What he said to do was just go find a radio program director who worked in the late 90s.

Right. Because the idea was just like, the record labels were constantly sending new music to the radio stations, and the program directors were the people whose job it was to listen to all this stuff. So I found one. Preston Elliott, he used to work for Y100, and I played in the song. That's... Okay. Okay. So President had never heard the song. He was absolutely sure. Okay.

But that was okay because there's one more avenue to try, which is actually Christian's idea, the singer from the band. It might be worth reaching out to, like, producers from the time. Oh, because probably, like, there was one producer who did, like, half of these guys' albums. Yeah, probably. And usually when you have a band that, like, is either trying to sound like another band or whatever, they would always try to.

Like, the guy, I think his name was Jerry, but he produced all the Blink 182 stuff. And then every band that sounded like the link 182 is like, let's get this guy to record. Right. Maybe there's that equivalent of that for the Bare Naked Ladies. It turns out there is. Her name is Susan Rogers. Hello? Hi.

That was weird. Did it answer funny? Well, first there was dead silence, and then there was a tone that sounded like a complex tone that was kind of rising in pitch. You hear everything musically. I don't know about that. Well, at least you hear things more musically than I do. Oh, okay. So Susan, along with David Leonard, did the bulk of the Bear Naked Ladies' production, and I played her the song.

Wow. Does it ring a bell? No. So she didn't remember it. But she had a totally different theory. I have a strong suspicion that what he's hearing in his brain is a hybrid, that it might feature a verse from Bear and Naked Ladies and a chorus from something else. when the brain is forming memories and has to take a pattern of neural activity, and it has to tag that pattern with this protein. But that pattern is pretty darn fragile.

Okay, so I think I should have mentioned about Susan. She actually left the music industry to pursue a career in academia. She knows a ton about cognition, how the brain works. But her theory that this is actually a false memory for Tyler, that it's two songs that he's fusing together. that's actually a theory mostly based in her days as a music producer. She told me the story about working in the studio. I remember one time Prince was, we were at rehearsal, and he was at the piano and taking a break,

and he's just noodling around with something, and he liked it, the thing he was noodling around with, and he looked up and he says, that's really nice. Did I write that? He wasn't sure. He liked it, and he wasn't sure if it was one of his or not. Before Prince had worked with Crosby Stills and Nash, and I'll never forget this.

Walked into the studio one morning after they had been up all night working on a track. And the engineer was just putting it away, so I heard the track. It was just instrumental at this point, and I said, oh, I love that song. And Nash looked at me, and he said, What song?

And I said, the one you're playing right now. Love don't live here anymore. Oh, no. We just wrote that and recorded it last night. And I went, no, you didn't, because it's on radio. So Susan's point, is even professional musicians can sometimes mix up whether they're writing a song or remembering a song. And she thinks Tyler just made the opposite mistake.

Like, he thought he was remembering a song. Actually, he was taking like chunks of songs he half remembered and writing a new song with them. Is there something musically, do you hear this song and just it sounds like, what about this song makes you think that it could be two songs crossed together musically? It doesn't really, doesn't really sound like a single. The radio was so damn competitive in the 90s. You had to be damn good. And it sounds like the kind of song that would have made the grade as a nice album cut.

But I kind of suspect my strong hunch is that that song is an invention. Susan's theory both made sense and sent me into a total tailspin. Because at this point, what I realized is that the song, obviously, is this terrible earworm. It's fully stuck my head. But it's an earworm that can never be removed because the cure for an earworm is to listen to it. And if this song does not exist, there's no way to listen to it. This is actually my worst nightmare. And honestly, like, I've been walking around for weeks thinking about how unusual and interesting it was that Tyler, a non-musician, had a sort of almost photographic memory for a pop song that he had not heard since he was in high school.

Susan's explanation for what was actually going on, it made a lot more sense. Sure, but that still doesn't explain our guy in Trinidad and Tobago. Piazo Man. Yes. That is what I thought. So I actually, I went back to the Stratocaster Forum. I went back to that post. I know it's two things.

One, Piazoman actually did not post very many of the lyrics to the song. He had that opening melody and then he had like two lyrics, really. So it was fully possible that Tyler had composited the song. Part of the song that he remembered. With something else. Okay. But the other thing I noticed in the original post is that Piazo Man actually mentions posting questions about the song on Facebook.

And so I was like, oh, I should try to find that Facebook post. Because the whole time I'd been searching for the song, Tyler had been searching for the song, everybody had been searching for the song. We've been searching the lyrics on Google. Nobody had looked on Facebook. So I start playing lyrics into Facebook. And I get a hit. A hit that leads me to the first person I've ever played this song for who actually recognizes it. Familiar? Yeah. Wow, they did that all from memory? Yeah. Wow, man, I thought everyone forgot about that song.

So this is Evan Scott Olson. The reason he remembers the song is because he wrote the song. Fucking get out of here! So when I did that Facebook search, I never found Piazo Man, but I found this other post from a guy in the Philippines who'd posted the entire lyrics to the song. Like everything Tyler remember, the verses, the chorus is actually a little bit more. And this guy, at the bottom of his post, helpfully identified the singer.

Do you want to know how Evan ended up writing a hip-pop song that disappeared from the internet? Of course I do. So Evans from Greensboro, North Carolina. He was 30 years old when he wrote the song. And he says it basically just popped into his head. Songs like that that kind of fall into your lap are totally an organic experience. They just kind of grow and grow. and I wanted something that was, you know, really pop-oriented

and I wanted to create something that had a really catchy beat. This song that just sprung from Evan's head, he called it so much better. And who were you listening to at the time? Like, who were your influences musically? At the time, I had been listening to a lot of you too, and you can probably hear that. Yeah, you probably hear that. I can hear it in the chorus.

So that's probably where that came from. And there is a band, and I can't remember the next. name of the band, but it was kind of like an industrial band that had really syncopated vocals. And I just can't remember the name of the band, but I was listening to do a lot of stuff like that. The verses to me sounded like bare-naked ladies. See, I never thought about that. Really?

I never really got into them. So I was very surprised to learn that Evan actually made this song completely alone. No band. Like he played every instrument himself. And once he was done, he just sent it to this company that could print CDs for you. and when he would play shows locally, he would just give the CDs out for free. Okay.

The thing that happened next is the part that just feels like the embarrassing dream that every musician has that they don't tell anybody, which is out of the blue, he gets a phone call from this guy who says, hey, I work for Universal Music. Oh, wow. The largest music label in the world.

Uh-huh. They send a Lincoln town car to his house. First of all, I live in Greensboro, North Carolina. It's like a medium-sized town. It's not a big town, but they send this town car, this really nice town car with this driver, really cool guy, and he's just telling me stories.

and talking up a storm. And so I get to the plane and I'm in first class. And then I get off the plane and there's, you know how people hold up signs with your name on them, you know? No one has ever done that for me. There's a guy with a sign with my name on it. And he takes me to the hotel. And I get into this big, huge suite.

And, you know, how do you absorb that kind of experience? I don't know. Evan does he kept thinking, like, this song's really quirky. Are they sure it's going to be? a hit. But it didn't matter. The whole thing was like a fever dream. He gets whisked into this meeting with Doug Morris, legendary label exec at the time the guy who ran Universal Music. I walked in there and he says, you like ice cream? And I said, yeah, I love ice cream. And he says something into this monitor on his desk and then this beautiful, like six foot tall, I guess it was his secretary.

I don't know, but she comes out with this tray of ice cream. Now check this out. Ice cream, like coconut, like this amazing, like coconut flavored ice cream that's like organic coconut flavored ice cream in martini glasses. And I sit there and I eat ice cream with Doug Morris. And there's a rapper called Juvenile. Yeah, I know Juvenile. And he had a song called Back That Ass Up. Yeah, I know Back That Ass Up.

Okay, when I first time I was in Doug Morris's office, he played me that song. I thought, wow, this is, this is. This makes my song look really stupid. It was just funny because, you know, Doug Morris at the time was probably in his 60s, and he was really digging this song, you know. And the next thing I know, I was signing a record contract. It all kind of happened so fast. It was really unbelievable.

That's ridiculous. Yeah. But it's like as soon as he signs the contract, things go downhill. They actually go downhill in a way that really reminded me of everything Stephen from Bar-Nicked Ladies had said. First, they don't do what you'd expect. They don't re-record the album, like, in a real studio with a full band. They just released his... They literally just took the thing he made and started sending it to radio stations.

Okay. The label did officially put the record out, but they basically buried it. There was no national tour. There's no real money for promotion. Evan says he actually remembers the moment where he realized what was happening. They have these drop dates where they put the record out, and it's always on a Tuesday. At least it was back then. was always on a Tuesday.

And the original drop date was September 9th or something like that. I can't remember exactly. And the first red flag was when they said, oh, we're moving the drop date. And I just knew that something was up. They were talking all about business and all about radio spins and all about, you know, I'm not getting enough radio spins in this place and I'm not getting enough in that place. And, you know, is it going to sell over here? And then, you know, Evan, we need you to call some people to see if you can get a spark going.

and this area. They wanted you to call, like, radio stations and tell them... They wanted me to call radio stations. They wanted me to call friends to see if I could get, you know. And I ended up, you know, this is really crazy, but I ended up paying, sending a check to a friend of mine in New York and said, I need you to go out, and his name's Gary, I said, Gary, I need you to go to that big record store. What was it called?

Tower records? Virgin, Virgin. Good of Virgin Records. Yeah. I said, go out, you know, here's a check. I want you to put in your record. account and I want you to go out and just buy handfuls of the CD. Just every record story you can find it, just buy handfuls of the CD. And he did. But, you know, it just wasn't enough to

to keep it going. And did you, at the time, did you feel disappointed that it didn't turn into the bigger thing? I felt, I felt bad because I felt like I had let them down because they were really expecting it to, you know, be a big hit song. And I just felt kind of guilty because was it something that... Because I started to think that maybe just because I didn't record it in a real big studio, I did it in my bedroom, you know. Maybe if I had gone in and done a huge, big recording of it, or at least gotten it remixed, you know, I don't know.

I think it's weird that you feel like you disappointed them because what it sounds like is they were like, let's just try it. Yeah, like they're throwing spaghetti against the wall and to see if it sticks. But you're the spaghetti. Yeah, exactly. So after the label dropped him, Evan just returned to his normal life in Greensboro. He says he went back to just playing local shows,

mostly covers. But he says he's happy. He says he's a professional musician. He gets to write songs for TV and movies. And he says, actually, without so much better, he doesn't think he would have had the confidence to really pursue a career in music. So when can we get a copy of the song?

Oh, he emailed it to me. Let me play for you. It's a jaw harp instead of a flute. The drums are way heavier, too. That's all of it. Tyler remembered this extraordinarily well. Yeah. Of course, I also played for Tyler.

My heart is pounding. This is crazy. Wow. Yeah. Holy shit. Yeah. Wow. That's a great song.

And I played it for Christian, the singer. Oh my God. Oh my God. How did he remember that? I'm going to immediately, when we're we're off the phone, listen to the song on repeat. That's awesome. Yeah.

Evan Scott Olson. If you want to see him live, he plays every Wednesday night at PrintWorks Bistro in Greensboro in North Carolina. Tyler's planning to go see him this spring. And Tyler said he's going to personally add the lyrics to so much better to the internet where they belong. Reply-all is hosted by me, PJ Boat, and Alex Goldman. We're produced by Shruti, Pim Meni, Thia Bennon, Damiano Marquetti,

Anna Foli, Jessica Young, and Emmanuel Jochi. Our executive producer is Tim Havis. You can hear a Spotify playlist of the songs from this episode at replyall. Dot limo slash better. And my intrepid co-host, Alex Goldman, has recorded his own version of the song, which you can hear at replyall. Dot Rocks. If you make a version of the song, please send it to us.

We were mixed by Rick Kwan, fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our intern is Lisa Wang. Our theme music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Additional music in this episode from Breakmaster Cylinder, Tim Howard, and Mari Romano. Special thanks this week to our band, Christian Lee Huff. Hudson, Max Whipple, Logan Hohn, and Jay Rudolph. Thanks to everybody at Rolling Stone, Christian Horde, Andy Green, David Brown, Hank Schemer, and Brian Hyatt, and to Chris Wade, Spiros Mehalakis, Rishikesh Hurway, and Emily Joe Mason. Matt Lieber is a small lemon tree

you can keep in your apartment. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in three weeks.