Lost Media Update: The Glorious Rediscovery of “I Wish You Well”

Probably the biggest missed opportunity in my very first post here was my mistake of not covering enough lost music. While you can go ahead and treat lost anime like the peak of lost media, I instead choose to take interest in an internet subgenre called “lostwave”. This can be summed up as any music that’s either missing despite its overload of known details or available but without a shred of info known on it. Some instances exemplify the former, like “Ready ‘n’ Steady” by D.A. from 1979, which had shown up on the Bubbling Under the Hot 100 billboard charts despite author and historian Joel Whitburn owning every song from the list on vinyl except that one. Then, there are some you might be familiar with as the user-proclaimed most mysterious songs on the internet, which have been available online with the caveat of lacking an ounce of info on their origins until recently. You have the one even Wikipedia titled as “The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet”, or “Like the Wind” by others for the very first lyric. Having first been heard on German radio airwaves, this is now known as “Subways of Your Mind” by FEX. A comparable example to that one was known as “Everybody Knows That”, which became infamous for having been heard in an ’80s porno. At this point, it’s been identified as “Ulterior Motives” by Christopher Saint Booth and Who’s Who?

Now, sure, these obscure examples are fascinating, given the lesser-known bands I’ve had lifelong connections to, but can you imagine your favorite hit artists owning a library of unreleased material? You have the Beatles’ experimental oddity “Carnival of Light”, the stolen Green Day album Cigarettes and Valentines that was reworked into American Idiot as the ultimate blessing in disguise, and that one Wu-Tang Clan album that was valued higher than any other album in history. Then, you have the Imagine Dragons, who have always been a mixed bag for me. “Bones” has become the theme song for The ElectroNuke, the main hero of my comic series, and I genuinely like “Natural”, but you also have overplayed classics like “Radioactive” and “Demons” that I never want to hear for the rest of my life. So, would you believe that the highest-potential song of theirs to resonate with me has been withheld from release while practically every other one sells out? Yeah, I sometimes wonder if this world hates my guts myself.

That’s not due to any controversy or objectionable material, though. Before they hit a home run with “Radioactive”, they showcased a song during at least two public performances titled “I Wish You Well”, which they would never go on to release on any future EPs. Information on it was scarce, and if you wanted to hear it, you only had two options: a fifty-second HD sample was played on the Official Blue Microphones Podcast, and the other was its second stage performance at the Velour Live Music Gallery in Provo, Utah. This second recording captures the full song. The only problem? The quality’s so unbelievably egregious that it’s believed by many to be intentional, as a sort of practical joke on those who wish to hear it. This happens with a lot of lost media, and as you can see, it’s pretty fucking obnoxious. As a matter of fact—and this is in no way a self-shill, considering what happened this month—I’d released an “I Wish You Well” mix that combined the HD snippet with three other Imagine Dragons songs: “Believer”, “Walking the Wire”, and “I Don’t Know Why”. No, that last one is not a Norah Jones cover. The editing’s a little gimmicky, but it was considered by certain commenters to be the closest we’d get to a full-length HD version for a long, long time.

Then, this past holiday season came, and we got one hell of a Christmas miracle.

An anonymous sender shared an HD recording of the full song with the Lost Media Wiki, who updated the song’s page to explain that it was a different studio version from the HD snippet. While this was seen as a victory, it could not be released on copyright grounds, with a commenter on my “I Wish You Well” mix claiming that the record label continues to take down uploads. This is to be expected, even if the song’s been more or less disowned by the band and record label. Then again, on Christmas Eve, I came across the YouTube upload here that, as of now, has stayed up for ten days in a row. Due to this not boding to be the case for long, I made sure to download and archive it as soon as I found it, and I can say with iron-clad conviction that “I Wish You Well” is the best Imagine Dragons song I’ve had the fortune of hearing. Whereas I always heard the snippet as sounding spacey and modern, hence why my custom mix was added to the soundtrack for a video game DLC adaptation of my comic series’s miniseries finale, “The Outer Limits” (said game is an open-world co-op shooter titled ElectroNuke: Triple Threat, but it’s very much just a fun hypothetical as opposed to a real project), the studio recording is certainly less so, but the lyrics are deep and somber enough to fit the tone of the miniseries, other than just echoing protagonist Elias’s backstory and arc.

“Picture all of your greatest fears;
Draw them up, oh, crumble down…

‘Cause all the people that I’ve seen, no, they can’t relate;
All the devils that I hear cry, ‘Take, take, take!’
Wishes that we wish, they evaporate;
All the blood that’s on the floor reminds us of our fate.

Oh, I wanna see you smile again!
After all, I think we’ve fallen to the bottom!
Carry on;
I wish you well.

Daddy’s in the kitchen;
Mama keeps on wishing that he wouldn’t come home late;
Now, I remember when it wasn’t just pretend;
I don’t wanna wait!

Now, all the people that I see, oh, they all relate;
All the devils that I hear cry, ‘Take, take, take!’
Wishes that we wish, they evaporate;
All the years that came and went, streaming down your face!

Oh, I wanna see you smile again!
After all, I think we’ve fallen to the bottom!
Carry on;
I wish you well.

Oh, I wanna see you smile again!
After all, I think we’ve fallen to the bottom!
Carry on;
I wish you well!

I wish you well!
I wish you well!
I wish you well!
I wish you well!
I wish you well!
I wish you well!
I wish you well!
I wish you well!

Oh, I wanna see you smile again!
Oh, I wanna see you smile again…”

– The lyrics as provided by the Genius.

There were definitely some intriguing surprises that came with this studio version. First off, it sounds less sci-fi and more closely resembles “Satellite” by Guster, another favorite of song of mine that’s been associated with ElectroNuke, namely the soundtrack for the also currently hypothetical ElectroNuke: The Animated Series. Something else that was apparent to me was where the snippet occurs in this version, that being nothing longer than the instrumental break and the start of the final repetition of the chorus. The tiny fraction the snippet captured was so miniscule that it wasn’t until now that I ever even had the full scope of the overall tune, given how unique the instrumental break is from the rest. Suffice it to say, this was so satisfying to experience—I’d been glued to this lostwave treasure for six or seven years now, having even released the closest thing to a full-length HD release—that I joked with my mom afterwards that there were few other presents I could’ve asked for this year. Yet, even then, one of the best I received happened to be a custom long-sleeve tee depicting the three main heroes from ElectroNuke, the Killer Watts, ironically taken straight from the album cover for the ElectroNuke: The Animated Series soundtrack.

Guess this world doesn’t hate my guts after all!