About three years ago, I was once a foolish and naive music listener. I was in the middle of switching music streaming services, and back then it wasn’t exactly easy to transport all of your music over like it is now. But I decided to start with a clean slate. “If I was meant to keep them, they will find me again” was something I vaguely remembered saying. So I started from zero, and if a song came to mind, I made sure to add it to my new growing playlist.
Biggest mistake ever.
Around the same time, I was also getting more into non-English-speaking music. So I was really giving up a lot more music than I had anticipated. With mostly all the titles being in another language, I didn’t exactly have them all memorized. But nevertheless, I was committed to the bit. And besides, if I really wanted to find an old song, I could always just go back to the old streaming service and check, right?
Nope. No, you cannot. Well, yes, you can if you do it within a certain time frame, which I think is like… three months after your cancellation date. But after that, you are out of luck. And there I was, in this exact predicament after a song decided to make a reappearance in my mind after months of not listening to it.
This song had a particularly somber feeling to it. You can hear it in the man’s voice as well as the acoustic guitar that was occasionally repeating the melody throughout. The string accompaniment was something that I was obsessed with too. When I first heard it, I was still making music. The strings strongly influenced my music. Instead of an orchestra of strings, the sound of a few violins and a cello became a part of almost every instrumental I made back then. I liked how distinctly each string instrument could be heard and identified. It felt more real, more emotional, with more weight to add to the song. And I had this melody and its instruments stuck in my ear and head. At one point, I was typing exactly that into searches in hopes of finding it. And nothing would pop up. I found some other songs that were quite good and hit that same feeling, but none of them would suffice. I wanted my song back.
And I mean nothing solid stuck. Over a year of off-and-on searching, and all I had to go on was a vague, fleeting melody, a man’s voice with some backing vocals, an acoustic guitar, and some strings. But after some hard thinking, a faded image of an album cover began to appear in my mind. I remembered three specific colors: white, blue, and black. I remembered that the album cover was dominantly white with some blue on the edge, and black was somewhere in there as well. I picked my search back up again and began looking for album covers that resembled my very descriptive imagination.
And still nothing would pop up.
In year two, I remember being at work and having some downtime. AI chats became popular, and I got the thought to use them to search for my song. So I typed in everything I knew. From the sound, the instruments involved, and the colors of the album. And yet… still nothing. At that point, I decided to give up. How was I to find this song in this vast pool of music that was released on the other side of the world in a different language, and I don’t even know how many years ago? I was lost.
And then one night, in my third year of searching, I struck gold. I honestly have to thank The Sagasu Review for flooding my playlists with different types of Japanese music. With that influence, I started rediscovering old music that I was listening to years ago. And that sent me down a rabbit hole that led me to “the one that got away.”
Very late in the night, I saw that album staring at me: the black silhouette of a man holding a guitar on a white background with a blue bar with text on it. I re-found Kazumasa Oda’s 「あの日 あの時」 (That Day, That Time). And track number two was 「眠れぬ夜」 (“Sleepless Night”). My song!
I was also able to do some research on that song. Turns out, Oda was part of a band back in the ’70s called Off Course, and this was one of their songs. The one I spent three years searching for was a re-recording from 2016. I think it’s great because it adds to that depth of somberness. The ’70s version definitely sounds ’70s. But the weight that song carries is more appreciated knowing how long it traveled to get here today.
I was relieved beyond measure. After over three years, I found it. And it was just as beautiful as the day I lost it. Every note feeling like meeting an old childhood friend. Those influential strings refilling my ears in all of their somber tones. I was at peace.
