Lost in Translation Vol. 14 REVEALED

While I significantly narrowed the genre universe this week, I wasn't surprised by the two readers that correctly identified the song.

Yesterday, after five hours of travel, I arrived back in the northwest of England after enjoying an 8-day traverse of Hadrian’s Wall followed by a few days in London. It was wonderful introducing a lifelong friend to the beauty of England and building new memories together, both on the trail and in one of the best cities in the world. Although I’ve been to London dozens of times, I hadn’t done any significant sightseeing since I was a kid, possibly not since the early 80s. I set an ambitious agenda for the two of us and from Wednesday afternoon through Friday evening we hit the sights pretty hard: Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey, Covent Garden, supper with a schoolmate we hadn’t seen in 40 years, Tower Bridge, the Tower of London, Saint Paul’s Cathedral, Bess Atwell in concert at KOKO in Camden (hopefully a post coming on this later in the week), the Natural History Museum, and the British Museum. By Saturday morning we were pretty wiped out, reluctantly admitting that we’d found our three days in London harder than the eight days of hiking!

Somehow I managed to take close to 300 photos in London; here are ten of my favorites:

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And now what you’ve been waiting for! It’s time to provide the answer to Monday’s Lost in Translation.

The Translated Lyric

Here’s the lyric I provided:

He hoped his memory would fade with time

For he raced, walked, and planned his journey

He fought, bit, and rode.

The sun went down, the moon rose.

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The Original Lyric

And here’s the original lyric as it was before being passed through half a dozen languages:

She's hoping in time that her memories will fade

'Cause he's racing and pacing and plotting the course

He's fighting and biting and riding on his horse

The sun has gone down and the moon has come up

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The Song

In an attempt to throw out a challenge, I decided to narrow the genre fairly significantly this week. While not an obscure song per se, the track I selected would likely only appeal to those that were plugged into indie and alternative rock in the late 90s. Two readers popped into the comments fairly quickly with the correct answer, the first of which was one of Kevin Alexander’s clones (given how prolific he is with posts and comments, while still working a full time job and staying connected with family, he has to be cloned right?!?). Kevin is so well versed in so many genres of music, and has been for so long, that I wasn’t surprised to see him correctly identify the song. I’d also very much expected Matt Madurski to be one of the few that would guess the song and my faith was rewarded as he hopped into the comments shortly after Kevin. If you don’t know Matt, he publishes one of my favorite Substacks, the always brilliant Chart Chat, which bills itself as “A chronological review of every #1 song on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart, with occasional tangents into random musical musings.”

For those that didn’t see the responses in the comments or weren’t able to figure out the correct song, the lyrics come from the Cake track “The Distance” from their second album, 1996’s Fashion Nugget. This may be one of Cake’s most recognizable tracks and it peaked at number 4 on Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart while also seeing some limited success in Canada, Europe and Australia. Matt’s still working through the first half of the 90s (he’s just hit December 1994), but he’ll be definitely be covering Cake at some point. While there were several fantastic tracks on Fashion Nugget, only one made the MRT chart (the cover of “I Will Survive”), but they’d go on to top the chart for three weeks in 1998 with “Never There” from their follow-up album Prolonging the Magic.

Here’s the music video, cued up at the start of the lyric:

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Feel free to jump into the comments with your thoughts:

• How did you do? Were you close? Or completely stumped?

• Did you know this song already?

• Would you have been able to name the song from the original lyrics?

We’ll see you again tomorrow with a new installment of Lost in Translation. Until then, happy listening!!