Prompted by what I experienced yesterday in evening in dancing school - I sneaked a peek on the laptop with the playlist and saw the song was called Heart of Glass by Blondie. Finally learned that title, after always hearing that tune with/without lyrics for at least four decades, coming to recognise it from the first bar!
Another instance in my case: I heard that tune from time (it was also the theme tune from a TV series I watched in the late 1970s), separately I from time to time read references to Greensleeves, but was not able to connect the two for at least two decades.
I am not the record buying kind; distantly recollect German radio stations used to announce songs back in the late Bronze Age but they stopped doing that at some time in the 1970s or 1980s. I am also too self-conscious to ask others or to ask Shazam or Siri when in the company of others. Sometimes I take pains to remember a snatch of lyrics to Google later.
Does this (being long familiar with a tune but not being able to put a name to it, sometimes for decades) also occur with others, or am I an extreme outlier?
Sure. There was a song that used to get a lot of airplay, a cheesy one but the soaring vocals really touched me, and I kept trying to catch the name of it. This had been going on since 1974. In 2010 I finally learned it was “When Will I See You Again” by “The Three Degrees”, so it took 36 years.
Similarly, I remember the theme music from Dracula, I’m guessing also since the 70s, but only a week ago was able to figure out it was from Swan Lake.
And there was a passage of opera I wondered about for decades, learning about a month ago it was the Flower Duet.
You’re totally normal. Listening to music in the car my wife and I often go around the “What’s this tune’s name, who did it, and roughly when?” game. We both recognize it instantly, but often neither of us know any of those things.
For many pop tunes the title is the catchy line from the chorus, e.g. “When will I see you again?”. For many others it isn’t. In my mind I tend to remember songs by the one snip of lyrics that I especially liked, either as a bit of poetry or prose, or just how it was sung. That little snip becomes my personal “working title” and I’m often mystified when I eventually learn the real title.
I too never bought much commercial music as either a young person or now. If the radio DJ didn’t announce the title, I’d have no way to learn it back in the day.
For many years, I read references to one of Stevie Wonder’s seminal songs, called “Sir Duke.” I was curious, because despite it apparently being a classic, as far as I knew I had never heard it.
Finally I got curious enough that I searched for it on YouTube and gave it a listen. And I realized that of course I had heard it many times. I just never knew the title. It was the song I had been thinking of as “You Can Feel It All Over.”
The words “Sir Duke” do appear in the lyrics, but only once, in the midst of one of the verses. Whereas “You can feel it all over” (or sometimes “They can feel it all over”) is repeated multiple times, and functions as the chorus of the song. I don’t blame myself at all for not knowing the actual title.
No, that never happens to me. I know the titles to every song I’ve ever heard. Why, I have the radio on right now, and I just enjoyed listening to the Who’s song ‘Teenage Wasteland’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘Everybody Must Get Stoned’.
Haha. Yes, it happens to me. Another thing that has happened to me several times, though I can’t think of a specific example at the moment, is that I get my mind blown when a song I’ve heard on the radio for years that I thought for sure was by a certain singer or band, I finally find out is actually by a whole other singer or band.
The one that frustrated me for years was “Kernkraft 400” by Zombie Nation. (Until Reddit and such came along, it wasn’t as if you could just search for “whoa oh oh song football games.”)
A while back I noticed a car radio that displayed the title and artist of the current song playing over the air, a nice feature I would have appreciated in the pre-WWW days. I haven’t investigated the tech; it probably requires some SMS-like bits being sent along with the broadcast.
It took about 2 days after the radios came out for the stations to realize that they could sell advertising over that channel rather than simply listing the artist and title at no benefit to themselves.
On one of my local stations, every song is titled either “Car crash? Call Smith and Jones, the Aggressive Attorneys!” or “ABC Plumbers. For all your plumbing needs!”
Funny you should ask!
I’ve been on a quest for a long time (months for sure) to at least list all the “old favorites”
from as far back as childhood!
So many of those things were instrumentals and I may never have know their actual title.
It’s been almost a hobby for years to try to make a complete list (with samples) of everything
that I ever considered “good” or at least “not bad”!
I estimate I’m still needing to identify at least 200 such items!
I wasted a lot of time trying to identify “that one alt-rock song whose chorus keeps repeating a phrase that sounds like ‘side of the road’” before finally learning it was Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle”.
Oh yes. When I was a kid the cartoons I watched often had classical music as themes (cheap, I suppose) and it wasn’t until I started listening to the classical station that I knew where a lot of the music came from.
Just the other day they played the Schubert Military March - music I’ve heard for ages but never knew the source of.
A good thing about Sirius is that when you are in the car you get the song displayed, and even when you are listening to my Google smart speaker you can ask “what is the name of this song” and get it.
In the past couple of weeks I heard them playing a classical music in the background of some cartoon I’m watching. It has a tempo that reminds me galloping I know it’s not William Tell. It could be Light Cavalry but I’m not sure. It’s driving me crazy.
There’s an immense body of songs I’ve heard often enough to recognize them but never knew their names. A tiny handful of those will be songs I like and want to own — or I get really curious about — resulting in one of these threads —
Heheh, I can normally guess the artist of a song and get pretty close. But even when I know the title and know the tune, it can be hit or miss. For instance, I have pretty much every Jesus Lizard record, and know the music and lyrics to a lot of their songs. I also know a lot of their song titles. But unless I’ve learned a riff from the song, I can’t seem to line the title of any of them up with a particular song.
On the other hand, I can kind of surprise myself. Many years ago I heard one of my co-workers say, “You, know who would know that? Scabpicker. Hey Scabpicker, who did the song that goes ‘Woman with the sweet lovin’, better than a white line’?” I thought about it for a half second, and replied, “That’s ‘Never Been any Reason’ by Head East”. I really don’t know where I had learned that information. I don’t know that I had ever even consciously thought about that song before being asked that question.
So later while pondering how I could have answered that question so easily, I listened to that song for probably the first time in decades. I realized I really kind of liked it, even if it was pretty silly. I was even more surprised to find out while reading the wiki entry for Head East recently that both of the singers are men. I had always assumed one voice was a woman, probably Ellen Foley. Nope!
This was the case for me with virtually all popular music on account of my hearing loss. I could recognize melodies but could never discern the lyrics, so I had no way of knowing a song’s title or often what it was even about.
This started to change when smartphones could reliably identify a song from a short snippet and these days the songs I “know” but can’t identify are mostly classical in nature.
Light Cavalry is quite likely, since it isn’t so tied in memory to one particular TV programme. In the UK another possibility would be Charles Williams’s Devil’s Gallop, but I don’t know how well travelled it is.
Back to the OP, I have this all the time with bits of classical music - I know I recognise it, and from somewhere I could dredge up enough memory to hum along as it develops, but the metadata escape me.
I experienced something similar with Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.
For years and years, I knew that it was one of his classic songs. I was also independently aware of the fact that there was a tune with an ultra catchy hook that went “ooooh oh oh, naaaa nana nana”.
Then, when I was 30, I heard that tune in a metro station, but for the first time, I could make out the words “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”. A true aha! moment.
