youtu.be/Rce8QnuFRVk

I ended up having to recreate it from memory in a DAW and used Google Assistant to identify it

Sorry, still looking. 30 years.

If I knew enough about it to describe it in a comment, I wouldn’t have trouble searching for it.

There’s this one blues song that had a line about a “sweet little thing” by a guy down in Louisiana doing this southern rock style blues. I liked the song in a situationship that ended weird, quit using the streaming service I discovered the song with, and now I can’t remember enough to find it.

Edit:

Tab Benoit "Little Girl Blues"

I tried plugging it in to the Mixtral 8×7B I have up right now and got it, or at least the name of the artist was right: Question: There was a song I really liked that was from a guy down in Louisiana that sang in a bayou blues meets southern rock style. The chorus and maybe even the name of the song was something about a “sweet little thing”. I first heard it on Spotify around 2017. I remember looking up the guy’s name and he was touring around the USA at the time. Do you have any idea who I’m talking about? Factual answer: The song is likely “Sweet Little Thing” by Tab Benoit, a blues musician from Louisiana known for his bayou-influenced sound. He has been actively touring in the United States since at least 2017. This information aligns with your description of the artist and song.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZCCT8Cv62M

Was a song I hadn’t heard for well over a decade. Bought a Blu-ray player from a thrift store. Whoever got rid of it forgot to sign out of Pandora. Ended up using the account because I figured nobody would care (otherwise the original account owner(s) might try to unlink the account from the device if possible) and the song randomly came on. Happened maybe almost a year ago.

It was The Middle by Jimmy Eat World.

Usually some soul-jazz post-bop joint but I can never figure out if it’s Cannonball Adderley or Lee Morgan.

For anyone in this position, don’t forget ¡[email protected] - maybe someone can help identify it.

On the Other place, one of my favourite time killers was to go through the various subs devoted to identifying music/movies/books/etc based on small clips, screenshots or even just descriptions.

Don’t think there are equivalents on Lemmy, but TipOfMyTongue can kind of serve that purpose :-)

A pretty famous song from the 80s. I only remember the intro, which sounds similar to the intro of “Take my breath away” by “Berlin”. Just a bass, going Dum Dum - Dum Dum. I know nothing else, not even if the singer is male or female. Tried to find it a few times, no luck.

I remember listening to a metal song while I played my Xbox 360 back when i was in high school. Even back then I never knew the title since I stole it from my sister’s computer. Recently I’ve been racking my head against the wall trying to find it again and I kept googling one lyric I remember but it coming up as Purple Rain by Prince which was way off from the songs genre. I tried everything from trying to recreate the song on the piano, asking friends, googling and more googling. Eventually I just gave up until I watched a youtube video about metal songs without the metal. And, by PURE COINCIDENCE the song was in the video.

It was Walk by Pantera.

I remember a song that still rings in my mind to this day and I remember watching it way back when MuchMusic existed on cable in my country. I just don't know the lyrics, I don't know the band. The only vivid thing I remember was parts of it's music video and I tried going off on that.

With the way search engines are today, it's hard to find results when all you've got is vague details. It sucks even more when you know exactly what you're talking about but the search engine drags in irrelevant contexts to what you're looking for.

I was only ever once able to find another seemingly lost track I heard of that I also only knew the sound but nothing of the lyrics or band. The only way I found that was through a lyric site, that I also forgot about. It was this industrial song that turned out to be 'War' by Wumpscut.

Also Conquest of Paradise for me! I had the tune randomly pop up in my head for well over a decade, probably close to two, without having any idea what it was. Every few years I tried finding out what it was, but at no avail. Online melody searches weren’t that good, and when I hummed the melody to people or played it on the piano, people either had no clue or, at best, were like “that sounds familiar but I have no idea what it is”. I even toyed with the idea that I had come up with the melody myself, though I did find it unlikely.

I can’t describe the happiness I felt when I finally discovered the actual song when I once again tried finding it, this time by humming into Google’s music search thing

When I was a kid in 1992/93, I’d listen to the local hip-hop station. They’re play house music at night and there’d be a track that would come up that was super catchy. Being the early 90s, and late night radio of just hour long mixed music, they’d never call out the song title and there’s was no internet to look it up on a playlist or something. It also didn’t help that the song was basically nonsensical lyrics, so describing the song by it’s lyrics was pretty worthless. Though I did try to look for it through the years, I never had much luck. It was so strange to me that a seemingly popular song just disappeared like that.

At some point in the late 2000s, I managed to discover a forum that specialized in identifying songs. I happened to have a recording of the song on cassette from the days I’d sit by the radio with my thumb on the record button for when my favorite songs would come up. I uploaded a small clip of it for them to identify it. A few days later after some incorrectly identified songs, someone says, “Nightcrawlers- Push the Feeling On”. Damn! I was elated! I looked it up on YouTube and there it was, with a music video too! I was very happy that day.

I got lucky in a sad way recently with discovering a song I’d had stuck in my head.

It was “Peter Gunn” by Duane Eddy, and I finally got the name of the song but only because of the news of his death.

I had one like that a while back. I’d heard the song on Pandora a few times and liked it, but it was just background music while i was working. The tune was catchy, but I couldn’t remember the lyrics at all. I tried humming it into sound hound and stuff, but to no avail.

Finally my wife was playing Pandora when I came home from work and it was on.

Welcome Home, Son - Radical Face

Back in the late nineties I had the reverse problem. I heard a cover of Bakers Street by the Foo Fighters on an independent radio station. I knew it was from a Japanese version of The Colour and the Shape, but no one had the CD. (Actually it was the UK version of the single My Hero, but either I misheard or the DJ was wrong. No wonder I couldn’t find it.) Then, Napster happened. I’ve still got that song somewhere on an old HDD, in all its 128 Kbps glory

“Something something, hot hot (?) ta da da, something something, hot hoooooot”

Has been stuck in my head for months now!

(By the way, “something” is always the same word, song from the 80s/90s I think, just in case there’s someone that can help 😂)

I had the tune to Men of Harlech stuck in my head for almost 20 years, then I randomly watched a video about Wales that used it, and I was able to make the connection from there.

She's a Star by James. The only part I could remember was the "star" part of the chorus, which is not exactly an easy lyric to decipher when you hear it on a supermarket radio. Eventually I found it by buying a James CD and running into that track by chance

It took me like a million years to find Brainbug - Nightmare (Sinister Strings Mix) because I had only heard it in a oddball movie trailer and the song wasn’t used anywhere in the movie.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByV9eCikkaU

I still haven't found a british 80's rock song that had a pretty popular music video about a kid that grows up into a punk and disapoints his parents. "get on off to school, your son will grow up to be a fool" "hey mama, hey papa, im 19 now. handsome tall and strong" "why the hell do you look at me as if to say what went wrong". have used search and it was one of the things I did to test the limits of ai awhile back. I should check to see if the new chatbot versions can do better.

“In The Meantime” by Chris Knight

Isn't there a way to find songs by inputting a melody? I thought that was a thing...

Creative use of search engines and possible lyrics have helped chip away at most of my list over the years. But two tough ones have been bouncing around my head since the early 90s.

One was a rap song I remembered from the radio with a really catchy hook. Then a few years ago during a birthday party the hook was suddenly just there blaring from the speakers, so I grabbed for my phone to search the audio. People yelled at me to put it away and keep dancing, but only I knew what was at stake! The song that was playing was Wilfredo Vargas - Abusadora, although clearly that’s not even remotely rap. But knowing that title, it wasn’t long before I found the song from my memory, which had sampled it. It turns out the original song is much better.

The second one was even more elusive, but it kind of nagged at me because even as a kid I had a sense of how massively popular this Spanish-language song was, so it felt like this one should be easy to find. But just a year or two ago I heard it blaring from the speakers while walking past a restaurant! Again with the audio search, I managed to identify it as Kaoma - Lambada and, whoops, my memory was wrong and it wasn’t even Spanish! But I was right about it being massively popular — plus the song has been widely covered, remixed and sampled (and even that popular version was itself a cover). Except none of this would have helped because the part of the song I thought was catchy was clearly not the iconic hook melody that everyone knows, so humming it for people never helped anyone get close to the answer.

Old rave music mixtapes.

I had a tape labeled as “sluggo vs urban: annihilation” that I simply loved to death. The tapes are long gone and I never found the artists/DJs again.

A song evaded me for maybe 5 or 6 years once. I ended up having this same conversation about evasive songs with someone and did my best at an impression, because it's instrumental.

"Doo-d' Doo Doo, Doodoo Doo, Doo-d' Doo Doo, Doodoo Doo..."

The person I was talking to instantly said it was Eple - Röyksopp, and was entirely correct.

I been trying to find one for a while. Its from a metal band and may be on a relatively new abum. I tried search, ai, looking though history and can't for the life of me find anything past a fragment of lyrics I can vaugly understand. I think IRS from a rather mainstream band but not one I'm familiar enough with.
I don't remember enough and most of its hard to understand the lyrics are close in sound but likely wrong AF.

Screaming:
... The more i see the less i feel. Reminding my self it not real...(no not Slipknot but its very similar sound to that lyric but Slipknot overwritten what I remembered since its sounds so damn close)

A slower section of the song, a whispery voice sings something along the lines of:

"...can you feel me from the side lines, friend"

My main electronic music growing up was Hard-Trance and then DnB, but we had a friend who DJed House/Big Beat and he would drop this feelgood banger that would get us smiling.

Lost the name of it for about 7 years before someone knew what I was talking about, then I forgot the name for about another 10 years before getting it again.

Will never forget it now.

Tune was only known to us as the ‘RingKingKing song’ Link here

I remember hearing this song all the time on the radio when I was younger, of course I started hearing it less and less. After probably 7 or 8 years of not hearing the song once I caught the very end of it on a rock radio station. I was like “oh wow I remember this song”. I tried to Shazam it but it ended right then, and I didn’t know any of the lyrics. I tried humming it to my brother, no dice.

Probably a year or two later I hear it on the radio again (my local radio kinda stinks so I don’t listen often). “Oh shit this is it”. Go to Shazam it, song ends. “Fuck”. This happened no joke like two or three more times over the next year or two, but then I finally got it: No one knows - Queens of the Stone Age