When I was ten years old, I would listen to the radio all day. I didn't have a CD player and MP3 hadn't really taken off yet, so the radio was my only source of new music. Of course at ten year old, I didn't really have a fully developed taste in music, so the radio was just fine, at least most of the time. Then one day I hear this wonderfully catchy song and it bugs me that I can't listen to it again whenever I feel like it. So the next day, I put a blank cassette into my crappy 1980's ghetto blaster that I inherited from my brother and I wait. Sure as hell, the song comes on again and I record it. Of course I miss the first ten seconds or so, but it's a good start. For the next couple of days, I record hours and hours of radio programming but the song never comes on again. So I'm stuck with my half recording, but that doesn't bother me much. I make some half-hearted attempts to obtain a complete version of the song, but as I don't know the artist let alone the name of the song, I ultimately just stick with what I have. So I listen to this song again and again for at least a year until something better comes along.

Fifteen years later, just a few days ago, I remember that song again. I don't know why, I just do. I know as much about the song now as I did back then, but now I have the internet. Funny enough, I do rember chunks of the lyrics which is kinda strange, considering that I didn't know a word of English at ten. One of the chunks I remember is "like the one we have here". Sounds pretty generic, but just one internet search with "like the one we have here lyrics" leads me to Paul Bennet's "This is real love". But is that really the right song? I don't know that yet, but I think it's very likely. A search on YouTube gives me this abommination and it sounds strangely familiar. It's a lot like the early Backstreet Boys just, for the lack of a better word, "gayer" (no, I'm not a homophobe, give me a break).

So after fifteen years, I finally find out the name and artist of a song that I enjoyed as a ten year old. If that's not amazing, I don't know what is. Of course the downside of this discovery is, that I now also know that the ten year old me had a very poor taste in music.

And I have another music-related internet story I would like to share with you: A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine all of a sudden started to whistle a familiar melody. I told him "I know that song, in fact I think I have it on CD, what is it?". He didn't recall. He had heard it played by a street musician but didn't know what it was. Things like that tend to drive me nuts, so the same day I went through a substantial part of my music collection but couldn't find it. As I whistled it myself, I remembered more of the melody and even some of the instrumentation. It was clearly a piece of classical music and it most definitely was a waltz, but beyond that, I had no clue what it could be. So after going through my classical music collection once more without success, I decided to record the parts of the melody I had remembered with my MIDI keyboard (yes I have a MIDI keyboard and no, I don't play the piano). So I uploaded my recording to watzatsong.com and just three minutes later, someone comes up with the composer (Dimitri Shostakovich) and the name of the piece (Waltz No. 2). So I looked through my classical music collection again and of course the piece has been sitting there all along.

So thank you internet. You are truly awesome. And if there's anything I can ever do for you, just let me know. Okay?