Internet sleuths looked for the singer of a mystery song for 16 years. They found her in Vancouver
Paula Toledo's song found an audience through, of all things, Russian bootleg DVDs
Mysterious messages started appearing in Paula Toledo's inbox on Dec. 8, telling her to brace for an onslaught of people trying to get in touch with her.
The messages said internet sleuths had been trying to track down a song she recorded some two decades ago.
"I was not sure what was happening," Toledo said from her Vancouver home. "It sounded a little bit too surreal."
She wondered if she was being targeted by some sort of elaborate phishing scam.
The details, though, were too specific. How could scammers know about How Long, a song she recorded in Langley, B.C., in the 2000s but never released commercially?
Then she noticed people started sending money to a website she set up to support her music.
She asked her son to look into it.
He visited the online discussion website Reddit and discovered a forum, known as a subreddit, called HLWIT, a 1,000-member strong community dedicated to a mysterious song they called How Long Will It Take — after a line in the song's chorus — or HLWIT for short.
Toledo's son told her a user figured out the song they were looking for was hers.
"He was like, 'Mom, this is legit. People have been looking for you for 16 years,'" Toledo said.
From Russian DVDs with love
Toledo then got a crash course in the world of "lost media," also known as "lost wave" — a corner of the internet devoted to unearthing forgotten bits of pop culture.
Users upload snippets of music stuck in their heads, and hope the internet hive mind can determine the song's provenance.
Toledo, 52, said she hadn't given How Long much thought since she recorded it around 2003 and licensed it to a TV show and TV movie. Online sleuths, meanwhile, had spent countless hours analyzing it.
She says watching a video essay about the HLWIT mystery left her flabbergasted.
"We were all watching it, my whole family, and we were just kind of moved to tears, to be honest," Toledo said.
"It was so incredible."
Zach Winkler, a 32-year-old from Missouri who helps moderate the HLWIT subreddit, says the first online reference to How Long dates back to August 2007.
Someone on a Ukrainian message board said they heard it on a bootleg Russian DVD. A snippet of the song played on a loop in the menu of unauthorized DVD compilations of animated films and TV shows.
Fans tried to solve the mystery on and off for 16 years, Winkler says. A new subreddit dedicated to the song was set up in October.
The case was cracked when a user named "the-arabara" searched the database of performance rights organization SOCAN (Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada) for any song containing the words "how long."
The discovery was met with jubilation on the HLWIT subreddit.
"I had been listening to the song multiple times every day, kind of obsessed with it ... I felt like I was about to cry," Winkler said.
'It feels like you've heard it before'
Toledo has no idea how her song ended up on Russian bootleg DVDs.
With its mix of guitar and Toledo's wistful vocals, How Long wouldn't seem out of place on modern adult contemporary radio or a movie soundtrack.
Winkler was in high school in the 2000s and says How Long captures the era perfectly.
The song feels familiar, he says, which made the mystery around it more intriguing.
It's a common feeling among lost media aficionados.
"People always feel like, 'Oh, I swear I've heard this,' because it captures a moment in music history and it reminds people of when they were younger ... You can't put your finger on it. You know you didn't hear it, but it feels like you've heard it before."
WATCH | Russian DVD menus featuring How Long:
After learning about the HLWIT subreddit, Toledo released the original recording of How Long on Bandcamp, a music distribution platform, with plans to donate proceeds to charity. She hopes to release it on streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music.
She's still trying to figure out how to navigate the modern music industry, she says.
Toledo grew up in Montreal before moving to Vancouver to attend university. She says she put her music on the back burner to focus on family after her husband died and she became a single mother.
Her love of music took her in a different direction. She earned a master's degree in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Her studies focused on music's ability to foster social connections and stave off loneliness.
After studying how music can connect people, she says her long-lost song has done exactly that.
Communities that hunt down lost music bring people together, she says. She's heard from people from across North America, Europe and Latin America. One fan made a charcoal drawing of her and others have made remixes and cover versions of How Long.
"I'm just so overjoyed to be showered with so much love ... from real people whose heart and soul are connecting to the music and then they're making their own art through their own experience of this search," she said.
"It's really magical."
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