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Subways Of Your Mind

~4 mins 15 Nov 2024

I still can't believe this.

The story

Way back in the 1980s, a small Kiel-based band called FEX recorded a song named Subways of Your Mind. Around that time, the song, unbeknownst to them, aired on the German-based NDR1 radio station and a teenager named Darius recorded it onto a BASF cassette tape. In 2007, his sister, Lydia, uploaded the unidentified song to a music-identification website in the hope that somebody would recognize it. No one did. And 17 years later, the song has finally been found. After countless dead leads, hoaxes, and stupid lyric interpretations, the song has been found.

In recent months, I haven't caught up with the mystery even though I have been a small part of the search since circa 2021. Today, after coming back from school, I opened Reddit because I had some free time on my hands, and low and behold, I read the title "The Most Mysterious Song on The Internet Has Been Found". I truly got shivers reading that. The last I checked before this discovery, the Horfest (German music festival back in the 80s) leads had just started circulating, but I never thought that just a few more months and the song would have been found.

My perception of the song

The song had always had a liminal and creepy vibe to me, and it sounded quite dark. Maybe that was part of the song being unidentified, or the recording being the only proof we have of this song existing. I just have a bittersweet taste after discovering that this song has been identified and it isn't aliens that made it, lol. Apart from this, the song has always just sounded catchy. And it helps that I love 80's rock music (especially ex-yu) which made me just love this song more. I was excited as fuck when there was a lead about the Serbian band Divlji Andjeli because for a second I thought that this song was actually from Yugoslavia which would have made it the perfect type of music for me. Don't get me wrong, I love Subways of Your Mind, but if this was an ex-yu song I would have been over the roof.

How it was discovered and how the band reacted

As I had mentioned before, back when I was a bit involved in the search, the Horfest leads had just been surfacing. I thought it was just another of the thousands of leads, but after u/marijn1412 came across an old newspaper article in the Nordwest Zeitung archive while researching the Horfest leads, he found FEX and sent Michael Hädrich (a band member) an email explaining that we have been searching for this song for 17 years now and if he did make this song. After sending proof and old material, Marijn and in the end we, the community, were sure that this was our song.

As for the band members (Michael Hädrick, Ture Rückwardt, Hans-Reimer Sievers, Norbert Ziermann), they were overwhelmed by all of the attention the song had caused them, but they were happy. They did an acoustic cover on NDR which you can see here

Michael Hädrich, the band member, also did a AMA on Reddit:

And he also did an interview for (now many) German news outlets and even Rolling Stone has written an article about the discovery of the song.

The future of FEX

Michael also replied that they are planning to do a re-recording of the song and that they are planning on releasing it on some kind of analog outlet (vinyl, CD, cassette). I'll be the first one to buy that!!!

Wow...

I'm feeling kind of nostalgic about this... or even anemoic you could say? Well, that's a topic for another blog post.

And thus the TMS saga ends... It has been a fun ride.

I hope you all enjoyed reading this post :)

Citations

This was Day 26 of #100DaysToOffload!

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