How The Internet Works

I've had an account on Last.fm for a long time and I noticed several months ago that there's now a section where the main page recommends free mp3s for me to download through the site. I'm a sucker for new music, so I always peruse that section every now and then.

A few days ago I noticed new songs and downloaded a bunch of them. Only one was good enough to be added to iTunes, a song by Imogen Heap (I love her) called 'The Song That Never Was'. Now the version of the song I had was called the TekMonki Mix and had a nice electronic beat in the background that I really enjoyed, but I still wanted to hear the original version. So I opened up Limewire and searched and searched and... you get the point. No luck. Alas.

I changed my tactic and decided to google the song, hoping to find a download link for the original version somewhere. Instead, it came to my attention that there was no original version.

From the website:

Imogen Heap wrote a track recently that was supposed to feature at the end of TV show. She wrote the song and recorded all the vocals, leaving the music for the composer who was writing the rest of the score. For one reason or another the song wasn’t used and so the track never got completed.

Now, Imogen wants you to download the parts and add your own musical interpretation.

Basically, people were allowed to download her vocal tracks and drop in their own music, and everyone's attempts were shared online. That's why there was no original, only-Imogen version. There's just people's mixes. Anyway, one of the tracks you could download for song-making purposes was something called a click track, which is sorta like a digital metronome.

After my own horrific attempts to lay Imogen's vocal tracks over some sick Tiesto beats, I wondered if there was any way to alter the click track I had been given. So I googled click tracks and somehow ended up at this blog post about click tracks, which eventually led me to another post about a BPM explorer app and from there I discovered this video on Vimeo. While the video is a pretty awesome visualization of music, I was more taken by the song itself. The creator of the video mentioned it was a song by Broken Social Scene but the title of the song was unclear.

Googling the band name and some of the lyrics ("it's a cruel world") revealed that the name of the song was '7/4 (Shoreline)', which I promptly downloaded and have been listening to ever since. No wonder; the lead vocals are done by Feist, whom I love to itty bitty pieces. :D

I just thought it was so crazy/cool how I discovered the current song I'm listening to through another random song I discovered. The internet is awesome sometimes.