When I was a senior at UF, I had my own single dorm room, with my trusty Toshiba Satellite laptop and a T1 internet connection. Those were the Napster heydays, and I downloaded tons of music. I got some interesting rare songs, too, and I was especially into Weezer at the time. I had this one special version of Weezer’s “Undone (the Sweater Song)” that especially amused me. Later, I lost most of that data in a hard drive fail or something.

A few years later, I tried to find those old Weezer tracks again. I had new tools and more hard drive space, and with software like Soulseek, I was able to find most of it pretty easily. But that one weird “Undone” track was unfindable. I didn’t even know the name. I described it as “a version of Undone with this weird gay-sounding rapper in it,” but that didn’t help.

Today I was reading about lucid dreaming, and I came across a mention of the movie Waking Life. I found it on bittorrent and downloaded it (it took a few hours). Then I stuck that on my USB drive, plugged it into my PS3, and watched it on my TV. Very interesting movie. Plotless, bizarre, but interesting.

There’s this one scene where the protagonist is talking to this weird guy, and I realized that his voice sounded familiar. Could it be that guy from the Weezer track I hadn’t heard in 10 years? I checked IMDB to see who the actors are. I wasn’t exactly sure which one was the guy from that one scene, but I narrowed the search down to three names and did a search with each and Weezer. Bingo. Timothy “Speed” Levitch.

Now I have the MP3 again, and have even seen a video of the live performance (below). It took 10 years to find this song. It’s not that special of a song; it’s not worth a 10-year search. But for some reason, that piece of my mind wouldn’t let go. With this blog entry, it finally can.