Imagine this: you just heard an amazing song on the radio, and you want to find out its name and artist. You put it through Shazam: nothing. You Google the lyrics you can make out: no dice. Finally, you decide to post a recording online to see if anyone can identify it. Surprisingly enough, the internet is just in the dark as you are. This has been the reality for a group of dedicated searchers for the past thirteen years, in their quest to identify what has been dubbed as “The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet”. 

In 2007, an internet user named Anton Riedel posted a snippet of a song to a German 80’s music site and spiritofradio.ca (a fansite for a Canadian radio station). They claimed that it was recorded sometime between 1982 and 1984 on a German radio station. It was a rock song with new wave elements, and although the lyrics aren’t entirely clear, those who heard it made out the words “Like the wind”, and that became the unofficial name of the song. The threads on both sites gained some traction, but no one could find a definitive answer. The song then fell into obscurity for twelve years. A user named redoalfo uploaded a clip of the song to YouTube in 2011, but other than that, the mysterious song had been forgotten once again. That was until April of 2019, when a Brazillian student named Gabriel de Silva Viera discovered a reupload of the song, and fell in love with it. “I really liked the song,” Gabriel said in a Rolling Stone interview, “so I started searching intensively until I found something relevant.” Gabriel uploaded the song clip to his YouTube channel, and posted that clip to a variety of Reddit communities. In June, he would create r/TheMysteriousSong, a subreddit dedicated to the search. The search would catch the attention of YouTuber Justin Whang, who made a video about the song for his “Tales from the Internet” series. This would bring a lot more attention to the search.

Not long after Whang uploaded his first video, the full version of the song was posted by Reddit user johnnymetoo. He downloaded the song back in 2007 when Anton uploaded it to a music forum. Gabriel uploaded the full version to YouTube, where it currently sits at over 2.6 million views. Meanwhile, the DJ who may have played the song back in the 80s was contacted, a man named  Paul Baskerville. He was a British immigrant in Germany, where he hosted a show on NDR called Musik Für Jung Leute (Music for Young People). He would play new music from obscure bands, so he was contacted by the search community. He agreed to play the song on his current show, “Nachtclub” on July 21, 2019. He didn’t remember the song, and didn’t think much of it. However, one listener of the program was an integral part of beginning the search. The next month, the identity of Anton Riedel would be revealed. It turns out that Anton was just a pseudonym for a German woman named Lydia. Lydia was the person who uploaded the song and began the search back in 2007. She reached out to Gabriel, and posted what she knew on Reddit. Her brother Darius recorded the song on a cassette tape from the radio sometime in the 80s, most likely between 1982 and 1984. 

Since August 2019, Lydia has been regularly commenting on the Mysterious Song subreddit, giving her opinion on the latest leads. Since then, the searchers have narrowed down the song’s year of release to 1984. This is because the synthesizer heard throughout the song is most likely the Yamaha DX7, which was released in late 1983. On a Reddit post where the user played along to the song with their DX7, Lydia said, “Wow, this sounds not only similar, it really sounds identical. Extremely hard to believe it wasn’t a DX7 which was used in the song.” Besides this development, there hasn’t been much in terms of solid leads. The search has been hindered by many false leads and trolls, but the spirit of the quest to identify this song has not been hindered.

We’re not much closer to finding the song than we were in 2007. As Paul Baskerville put it in the Rolling Stone article, “This needs a lot of time. It will presumably last several years.” Will the song ever be identified? Only time will tell, but the search group is confident that they will eventually find the band responsible. Until then, the song remains the most mysterious on the internet.