I was shocked to get a lead on one of my mystery songs tonight while listening to an independent artists site. I first heard this song on the Muzak website, and it was some jazzy, ambient sounding thing with some guitar, bass, and a nice piano melody. The piano was what caught my attention. I was sure I had heard it before, but I had no idea where. I had little hope of finding out what it was in the near future because the people I know don’t listen to that kind of music. I certainly didn’t expect to come across any clues while avoiding the major music labels!
The clue came from a pianist named Michael Dulin on download.com. When I first heard him I was really impressed. I usually don’t like piano music, but this guy is great. He had a piece called “Simply Satie,” and to my astonishment, I recognized the melody and accompaniment from my mystery song. But in this case it was only a piano piece. Since electronic artists are always remixing other songs, I figured that’s what had happened here, so I began an investigation.
According to an Amazon review, “Simply Satie” by Michael Bulin is based on “Gymnopedie #1” by Erik Satie, so I looked up that and found out that Erik Satie was a classical composer, of all things. Unfortunately, it turns out that that piece is very popular and exists in numerous arrangements (which might explain why it sounded familiar when I first heard it), so just looking up “gymnopedie #1” and satie in Google didn’t get me very far.
After a few false starts, I came up with a winning search: ‘gymnopedie satie (ambient or electronic or jazz or “new age”) -tabs’ in my trusty metasearch program, Telescope. And I found it. It’s “Falling” by Chris Coco, on his album Next Wave, which I have now ordered. Yaaay! That was one I really wanted to solve. I was also curious about the genre it belonged to, which turned out to be chillout. Another genre to explore.
