"Most mysterious song on the internet" identified after 17 years — and the band was oblivious to the online phenomenon
For the last 17 years, a worldwide army of online sleuths obsessively tried to figure out the title of what has been dubbed "the most mysterious song on the internet."
Now, they have the answer after a chance discovery by one intrepid researcher who triumphantly reported his breakthrough on online forum Reddit: it is called "Subways of Your Mind" and was recorded by a little-known 1980s German band called FEX.
The former band members are "absolutely overwhelmed" by the news, 68-year-old Michael Haedrich, who played keyboard and guitar and sang back-up vocals for FEX, told Der Spiegel magazine.
The band had been oblivious to the online phenomenon, he admitted.
How the mystery unfolded
The mystery began in 2007, when a German brother and sister uploaded a track online that they had digitized after originally recording it as teenagers on a cassette from the radio. As Rolling Stone reported in 2019, the tape mostly featured songs from popular bands like XTC and The Cure, as well as one particular song that remained a mystery — until now.
The German siblings asked for help to identify it and audiophiles soon took up the challenge.
The track did not show up in any music databases, but online sleuths tried to work out what instruments could be heard and analyzed the lead singer's accent.
Initial attempts to identify the song, soon classified by many as being in the 1980s' "New Wave" genre, yielded little.
It was only when the track was uploaded onto Reddit in 2019 that global interest exploded.
A Reddit subforum called "r/TheMysteriousSong" attracted tens of thousands of members, and the hunt was reported on in German media and beyond.
The big breakthrough finally came earlier this week when a user called "marijn1412" said he had identified the song as "Subways of Your Mind."
He said he came across former FEX members while researching an event for up-and-coming bands that had been organized in the 1980s by a public broadcaster in northern Germany.
The Reddit user wrote that he had reached out to members of what was a four-piece outfit from the northern city of Kiel, who sent him a version of the mystery song, and revealed its long-sought-after name.
Marijn1412 wrote: "After I emailed him back that the song is actually quite a famous 'lost song,' he asked me not to go public with it until he spoke with his old band members. In the meantime, though, the song did get registered at [the German performance rights organization] GEMA and people found out about it. But I'm happy to say that the band members agreed for me to go public with it."
Haedrich, who is still a musician, told Spiegel that it was the first time he had heard about the massive search effort.
"I thought it was amazing that someone was interested in music by a band that was only successful regionally, if at all, and that was over 40 years ago," he said.
Haedrich, who lives in Munich, said the band members now want to reissue "Subways of Your Mind" and are trying to track down the original recording of the song.
Their success may have been decades in the making, but he said "for us, it has just come suddenly."
