The Final White Whale Update

Some may remember this Top Ten post from 2019, about three White Whales. (Things that I loved at one point but can't find and am therefore unable to experience nostalgia around it.)

The first was a 1994 TV show that I started looking for in 2006 and found in 2013. 

The second to be completed was about a picture book from 1991 that I started looking for in 2005 and finally found in 2019. 

The third was about a band I saw perform in 2001-02. I started looking for them in 2006...

Nearly 20 years after the fact, I was forced to accept that I was never going to find this band. They were playing at a party, not even at Canopy Club or something. The idea that I was going to find this band at this point was ridiculous. 

After making my own AI-generated music, I tried to connect these two unrelated pursuits to close the book on this missing band from so long ago.

Of course, that didn't really take. 

So I fired up ChatGPT to see if it could find the impossible. 

Here was the first response:

I tried to give it more info and it came back with:

I listened and it didn't seem right, plus it was way too late for the album to come out. 

So I gave it more info.

My jaw dropped. 

A band in the right genre, that played central Illinois college towns, with an album that came out in the right timeframe. It's promising, sure, but not a smoking gun. 

But the name of the lead singer. Mitchell. 

And yes, one of Park's songs from No Signal is acoustic. If you go back and look at my 2006 email, I was confident about the acoustic part, hazy on the violin part. 

It was all adding up. But just to be really, really sure...

If that wasn't enough, just playing the music, it sounds like music I like. 

In case their Wikipedia page ever gets removed, here is Park's discography from there:

And just to pre-empt any confusion, their last 3 albums are on Spotify, but they're all listed as 2006, which is just a Spotify error.

So yeah. ChatGPT is pretty impressive. And it's fun to be able to listen to No Signal and think I was hearing it 24 years ago and searching for it for 19 years. Mostly though it's amazing to think that I found it after all these years.