At some point, the dream of reaching an audience fades away from most musicians. Nashville’s Alex Caress had all but given up on music. Little did he know, passionate fans of a song that he wrote over 20 years ago, have been trying to find him for years.
It all started with a mix tape.
In 2006 or 2007, a high school girl in Spokane, Washington named Michaela Alden, burned a mix tape she made onto a CD. It was called “Really Good Mix.” It had songs by indie mainstays at the time like Rainer Maria, Modest Mouse and Built to Spill.
And then 13 years passed.
In a who-am-I-and-what-am-I-doing moment in her life, Alden went back to her parents’ house in 2019 to reflect on her former self. In the process of unearthing some old memories, she opened a box that held “Really Good Mix” and she popped it into iTunes. All the info for the songs auto filled except for one song, which popped up as [UNIDENTIFIED SONG] [UNIDENTIFIED ARTISTS]. She figured that finding this information would be relatively easy. “I’m like, ‘Okay, I’ll Shazam it.’ No result,” she said. She checked the lyrics on Genius and Googled around but couldn’t find anything. Reaching an end point, she decided to put out the call.
“Please help me identify this band. 2000’s alt rock” was the caption of the YouTube video she uploaded.
“Once they post and asked for help, then it’s considered Lostwave,” a user named Azur_blast told me of Alden’s upload.
The Lostwave Community is a relatively new corner of the internet where a community of sleuths are dedicated to identifying and preserving uncredited music.
“As a hobby, it’s just very fun trying to find the, the origins of the song,” Azur_blast said. He was drawn into Lostwave through the most mysterious song on the internet, and has been hunting down songs for the past couple years from across the world. He said this mystery song would be particularly difficult: “For the early 2000’s songs, those are usually really challenging cases.”
The Lostwave Community titled the song “We Tie Ourselves To Lies,” or WTOTL after a prominent lyric in the song. Fans made TikTok videos, a subreddit formed and someone started a podcast. The biggest lead was that Alden was involved in the local Spokane music scene and even had a show on the local radio station. Local musician Glenn Case was instrumental in drumming up support and interest around the mystery. He even went through the entire unidentified CD collection at Spokane record store 4000 Holes listening for this one mystery song. “There were even hoaxes” Alden said. Trolls posted the lyrics to Genius and said the song was from a long lost German band.
The search lasted six years.
And then one night, Azur_blast and another user named Shardanik started looking on MySpace, the social media platform of choice in the mid 2000s where artists could upload their songs directly to the website. However, there was a big problem: “In 2019, MySpace lost over 50 million of their songs.” Azur_blast said.
When people moved on, Myspace stopped paying the bills on the servers, so the songs aren’t there, but the bare minimum title and artist info remain. The two started typing in random lyrics of the song into the search bar and they got a match with the line, “Don’t Get Over Me.” Azur_blast said that it was quite promising because the song length was exactly the same as WTOTL.
The artist was Alex Caress. Azur_blast found him on Instagram and sent him a message that said, “Is this you?” plus a link to the YouTube video.
“I said, ‘This is absolutely insane. This is me,’” Caress said in an interview.
Caress uploaded the song to MySpace when he was 18 years old. For the past 20 years, Caress has worked in hospitality in Nashville.
“We went from empty nowhere to a promising lead to the actual answer, just like that. I was shocked,” said Azur_blast.
A lot of the fun of Lostwave is simply solving the mystery, but the community genuinely loves this song.
“It has kind of a soaring, like very heartfelt feeling to it,” Alden said.
Caress was working at a grocery store and living with his parents in Boston after high school when he put everything into this song. It is a yearning song, earnestly wondering what would happen in his life in the years to come. Listening to it now, Caress hears his younger self.
“To come back to that after not listening to it in so many years, as someone now who’s nearly 40 who can answer those questions… its just like, it’s this weird cosmic conversation that I’ve been able to have with that kid,” he said.
I said: “I can imagine when you’re 18 and you’re really feeling those emotions. And you think, ‘I’m gonna channel this into a song. And this song is gonna reach somebody.’”
“And it never does.” said Caress. “And so you let go of that.”
But all the song needed was time.
“It’s so beautiful. It’s so like sung from the heart,” Alden said.
In the process of verifying his identity to Lostwave, Caress’s parents sent him the original hard drive holding the song. That hard drive held 13 other songs from that time that were lost until now. Caress has just released them in an album called, “I Am Always Here.” It is out now.