Man woke up singing song nobody else could remember before uncovering shocking truth
I'm not sure about you, but nothing irks me more than when I have a song stuck in my head that I can't remember the name or artist of.
Typically if this happens to anyone, you'll ask your friends, partner or colleagues if they remember the tune (once you've badly sang it to them), or you may turn to apps like Shazam to try work it out.
But what about if all these means failed and you were left singing a song that no one remembered?
This is what happened to filmmaker Tyler Gillett when he tirelessly hunted for a song that he feared never actually existed.
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Gillett was adamant that the song stuck in his head (also referred to as an earworm) was from the 90s, but his wife and Google couldn't identify the track, sparking him to get in touch with the team behind the Reply All podcast.
In a bid to try name the tune, the podcast producers went as far as having a professional band recreate the song that appeared to have been made up in Gillett's head.
A music producer turned neuroscientist, a legendary music critic, and Steven Page, the former front man of Barenaked Ladies, were even brought in in a bid to identify the song that had made residence in Gillett's mind.
Did they work out what it is in the end? Long story short: yes.
When all hope was almost lost, they looked up some of the words on Facebook and went on to find that someone on the social media platform had post the all the lyrics.
In the section comments of post, it named the original writer of the lyrics - a man named Evan Scott Olson who wrote the mystery song in question titled 'So Much Better'.
But did this niche song end up in Gillett's head? When Olson was signed by his record label they shipped out all his CDs to radio stations world wide but there wasn't a tour or any promotion to go with the release of his album.
With this in mind, the popularity of the song eventually died out after its release in 1999 - but Gillett just happened to be one of the very few who remembered it.
The podcast episode was released in 2020 and Olson's song has gone on to became increasingly more popular because of it.
In fact, at the time of writing the decades-old track has been listened to over a million times on Spotify.
Apparently the hitmaker himself reached reach out to the podcast after the episode aired saying he liked it.
Speaking to Vulture, former Reply All co-host P. J. Vogt said: "[Olson] sent me an email saying he liked the episode. I’ve been watching his Twitter, and I think he’s really been enjoying watching people discover the song. And he should be!
"This totally feels like the kind of song that would be on the radio then, so it’s nice for him to see, long after the point where this song would’ve been found by people, that people are finding it right now."
Niamh Shackleton