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.

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.

https://youtu.be/eS2mfeo-Ues

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

There’s a Kiwi reggae band called Fat Freddy’s Drop, and I got the mp3s of their first album Based on a True Story from a friend not too long after it came out. Later I lost them on an old HD, and when I went to get the album again most of the songs were different versions, and noticeably worse than what I remember. I’ve been able to track down a few of the old versions over the years but not all of them.

Part of the difficulty is not knowing what the versions I first heard were. They didn’t sound live so it’s not as simple as trying to find concert versions. Trying to find a specific version of a song can be more frustrating than not knowing what a song is entirely :/

Sorry, still looking. 30 years.

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

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

A techno mix made with Super Mario bros. from the early 2000s most likely from Napster or Kazaa. It wasn’t a melody from any of the Mario games, but it was constructed with sounds from it.

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

Years ago, I downloaded a relaxed-tempo, acoustic version of “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters, that was fantastic. I lost it when my stupid, proprietary NAS decided to re-initialize both RAID disks. I’ve searched repeatedly, but all that ever comes up is Dave Grohl’s solo performance on The Howard Stern Show.

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.

“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.

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.

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 to 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