Here’s the trailer for a 2010 film called “The Exploding Girl.” It looks like a good movie but I never saw it. I heard it was aight. Zoe Kazan is a fox, I think.
Like any warm blooded internet user, I immediately searched for the song in the trailer. It’s excellent and I needed it in my iTunes library as soon as possible. This was 2010 of course.
Some YouTube commenters were wondering the same thing, but no one was really getting anywhere. A quick Google search showed me that others were in pursuit of the same mp3.
Now around ten minutes into a song search, I watched the trailer again. This trailer is great, I need that song in my library quick.
I stumbled across a chatroom discussing the song. Apparently the song sounds a lot like the band, Mum. Wikipedia told me that Mum is a band from Iceland which formed in 1997, not unsimilar to my initial Sigur Ros guess.
Okay, so if the song is by Mum, what is it called? There were many links to a song called “We Have a Map of the Piano” by the band, which, though very good was definitely not the trailer song.
After a week of getting no where I was feeling pretty stumped. Never before had I been completely fooled on the whereabouts of a song. What is this internet even for? Had the song been created solely for the movie? If so, why isn’t anyone trying to monetize this masterpiece works so perfectly over images of sad indie 20-somethings.
I proceeded to Google search, finding leads that fizzled somewhere over the Baltic Sea. I broke my rule and began posting on the chat rooms myself. Enraged that new one had written the producer of the film, I drafted a letter and looked for an email address.
Coming up short again, I decided to take a month hiatus on the search. I would check again when the trailer had been seen by more people. In May of 2010 Mum posted on their website (which has a pretty cool design) that the song does indeed have their finger prints on it, only it came from their previous band, Andheri. The song is called “Hvernig á Aðsær Vinisína” which translates to “How to hurt our friends,” which we probably all should have been able to guess.
Andheri, I would find out only released one EP with 7 songs on it. None of those 7 songs, however were the elusive, “Hvernig á Aðsær Vinisína,” meaning that there is a good chance the song isn’t even in mp3 format. Mum received requests daily on their guestbook to post the song in mp3 format. This is my favorite request:
Had I come to the end of the journey? I found out what the song was called and traced its origin back to a mid 90’s Icelandic band. To an extent yes. Still, it was the only song I had come across and not really found.
Fast forward now to summer of 2012. Bored on the couch, I decided to google the song again as I had done periodically over the past few years. You know, just in case there had been any new development in the “How to Hurt your Friends” department.
And what do I find, but this…
Those sneaky Icelanders re-released the song as a Mum song. You can imagine my surprise. A snare drum was added throughout the song, which I dislike, but perhaps it was in the original. I’ll never know.