It’s the weekend again and time for another Station Break. This is my first one here as a contributor on JAMM so I thought I’d talk about the one song that tortured me the most as a music lover, not because it’s bad, but because it took me 18 months to find it, no kidding.

Ever had a song stuck in your head for a while, without you knowing its title or who sings it? That’s a summary of my story with Alalie Lilt’s song Flaws. I heard it a few times on the radio, got it stuck in my head and never figured out what it was. I would hear it every now and then on some local station but never have enough time to call the DJ and ask what song that was (yes, I used to do that). My usual trick when it comes to unknown songs is to write down a few sentences usually from the chorus then hit Letssingit.com, search for the lyrics and find the song. Easy peasy. In the rare instances where I don’t find the song on Letssingit, I Google search the lyrics, and always find them.

Not this time. Fast forward hours and days of internet searches: Google, MSN, Yahoo!.  Every variation of the lyrics, shared by me and my friend who was also stuck on it. Fast forward numerous questions to every human soul “do you know a song that goes like this…?” followed by me humming the song in my awful voice. One year later, an internet buddy told me it *could* be called Flaws or Flaw or Flawless… anyway he believed it had “flaw” somewhere in its title. Another series of fruitless searches and I basically gave up on finding the song.

18 months after I first started to look for it, I decided to hit the local CD shop near my house, in a rather pointless attempt. I hummed the song to the owner, he didn’t recognize it. He asked for a title, I said it might have “Flaw” in it. A small search in the database and he tells me there are 5 songs with “flaw” in their title, plays them to me, until he reaches “Alalie Lilt – Flaws” and when the first tone is played I scream “THIS IS IT!”

What do you know?! 18 months of fruitless web searches, and the song was sitting in the local CD shop, 100m away from my house.  Cue in disappointed feelings about the whole internet as a virtual database.

So who is Alalie Lilt? Apparently, it’s not a one person gig as I first imagined, but as Last.Fm states “a nearly-all-girl-alternative-folk-rock band from Vienna, Austria [...] performing since 1999 and they released two albums until the beginning of 2006″. The lead female vocalist, Clara Humpel, then started a solo project of her own. The song, Flaws, is a very nice tune of soft guitar with a haunting vocal from Clara. It probably isn’t a musical masterpiece, but it definitely manages to make an atmosphere of its own and is until now in my top 10 most played songs in my iTunes library, and a song I look for when I need a familiar tune to listen to while working. I surely have to make up for all the time I spent looking for it!

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