Took me decades to identify Sweet’s “Fox on the Run.”
Someone once suggested to me that the song might be “Fox on the Run” but they didn’t specify the band. I assumed they meant the Manfred Mann song from 1969 that was also titled “Fox on the Run,” and I knew it wasn’t that. So I remained confused for a few years longer.
I know Liz Phair’s Exile on Guyville inside out (saw the recent show, as well), and could sing pretty much every word of every song, but I couldn’t tell you the titles of about half of them. Dude, I didn’t realize until last week that the title of one of my favorite songs on that album is “The Divorce Song.” “Dance of the Seven Veils?” Oh, that’s the “Johnny get out of the business” song. It’s almost shameful, as it’s one of my top five, if not top three, albums of the 90s. It’s one of three vinyls I own. I’ve even read her memoir! But the names … I just never followed along. Just listened to the music, over and over and over again.
In most of @Mean_Mr.Mustard’s “songs by the letter” polls I’m unfamiliar with many of the songs people nominate. But actually, I probably have heard a lot of them; I just don’t know the titles, so my brain just isn’t connecting the titles with the songs.
There’s an entire subreddit for just this. You could go to r/tipofmytongue and post “I’m trying to ID a song I’ve been hearing for years. It’s upbeat, disco-y and the (female) lead vocals are very high pitched and bouncy sounding” and you’d probably get an answer within 10 minutes.
The easiest way to ID songs like this is to download the Shazam app on your smartphone. When you hear the song playing open the app and tap the “tap to Shazam” button. It will listen to whatever song is playing and it will usually have an ID for you within a few seconds. It works surprisingly well even when there’s lots of background noise; I’ve used it in crowded restaurants and it still was able to ID the song that was playing.
I do this as well, and I am also surprised at how quickly the app identifies a song. You can also click a button and add it to your Spotify playlist.
mmm
Everybody knows that one is called “Teenaged Whistling.”
My wife has an Apple phone. She says “Hey Siri, what’s this song?” & holds the phone up in the air. It usually works in a few seconds.
I assume my Android could do the same; I haven’t bothered with any of the voice-related features of it.
Special apps don’t seem to be necessary these days.
As I alluded in the OP I am reluctant to do this unless I am alone. When I am with my wife,
I have a different problem, a frequent inability to identify the name of songs that I’ve heard 1,000 times until the song name shows up in the lyrics. I can hear a song off of Boston’s first album, which has been in regular rotation for me since 1977, and just. not. get. the. name. out. until the lyrics kick in.
My problem is that I will sometimes get a fragment of a riff or lyric stuck in my head and can’t remember what song it is from. Sometimes I can “play the song in my head” and eventually figure it out, but other times it’s just that one fragment looping over and over and driving me crazy.
(Most recently was the phrase snippet “at least I thought he was” that I finally pinned down to John Lee Hooker’s “I’m Bad Like Jesse James”.)
“Go with him…”
That happens to me all the damn time. Most recently from “Further to Fly” by Paul Simon I kept hearing echoes of the line “Days falling backward into velvet night” but with the wrong tune, and the wording too garbled to form it into a useful Google search.
Interesting, the one I follow is Reddit - Dive into anything. It really is something seeing people name a tune from a verbal description of it, especially when I am completely stumped. It’s a really fun pastime, I spend a lot of time there amazing people and being amazed myself.
I thought it was Middle Age Waistline.