Sometimes, there are mysteries that Mulder and Scully can’t solve, but we can in 2023. Figuring out what song is playing in a movie or television show can be an impossible game. Luckily, most of us can just ask Siri or Shazam it and move on. Unless you’re this one song in The X-Files.
Lauren Ancona took to Twitter to share an experience many of us have had: throwing on The X-Files to just have something on in the background while we’re working. The only issue was that there was a song in the episode that she wanted to hear again, and she couldn’t figure out what song it was.
In season 6 of the series, there is a two-part episode titled “Dreamland,” and in the second part, there is a song that plays in a bar. She tried to Shazam the song to no success.
The interesting part was that this issue was not a new problem. Back in the ’90s, when the episode was released, this was also a problem for fans of the show trying to figure out the song in question.
Luckily, the skills of fans of The X-Files meant that within hours, the digging continued until finally all of the detectives of the internet discovered that, after all these years (and contacting people who worked on the show and found the cue sheet?), the song is called “Staring at the Stars” and was written by Glenn Jordan and Dan Marfisi. It was, seemingly, specially recorded for the show.
So while it might not be seeing what is out there in the unknown world, it is a case that we can now close for fans of The X-Files.
This IS typically my one skill
Often, when I’m talking about music, I can figure out at least the artist or the song. So the fact that I didn’t help solve this case, especially for The X-Files, hurts. But hey, at least the collectiveness of X (a dying artform) solved it quickly, right? Our love of both Fox Mulder and Dana Scully can still bring us together to do one thing as a society, right?
Look, when you get an earworm in your head, if you can’t figure out what is going on, it can and will feel like you’ll never be free, so this discovery probably freed a lot of people from misery. Maybe some had moved on, found that happiness outside of not knowing what was going on with a song they might have forgotten about. Others? They’ve probably spent every waking moment since 1998 just staring at the wall, hoping for the sweet release of someone being able to shout out “Staring at the Stars” to them.
Now, we have the answer. To those who have passed on from this plane of living without that answer, I am sorry for your loss and your uneasy entry into the next world. But at least those of us plagued by this will now be able to move on.
(via Tor.com, featured image: Fox)
