In the nascent Internet era of 2004, Alex Caress found in an empty upstairs living room, working in a grocery store deli, and filling the long hours with music as all his friends had ventured away from town. He and his brother turned the room into a makeshift studio; outfitted with a clunky desktop computer, Fruity Loops, Nuendo, and a couple of battered microphones. In that space, Caress wrote and recorded more than a dozen songs - each honest, questioning, and emotionally raw. By the fall of 2005, a handful of the tracks had made their way to his MySpace profile before he packed up for Belmont University in Nashville and left those recordings behind.
Some 16 years later in 2021, one of the songs from those sessions - “Don’t Get Over Me” - was uploaded to YouTube by a member of the LostWave community; a group of music sleuths who track down beloved but uncredited music. It seems that the MySpace track had made its way on to some mixed CDs with no discernible author. Years passed within the community attempting to track down the source but thanks to MySpace deleting almost all of its data in 2016, results were nill.
In 2025, an anonymous message arrived in Caress’s Instagram inbox: a link to a YouTube video and a link to his long-abandoned MySpace page. The message revealed that his teenage song had become a kind of internet mystery, hunted obsessively by fans for years under the name “We Tie Ourselves to Lies.”
The rediscovery sparked a whirlwind. Subreddits, TikToks, a podcast episode, even a Discord channel had been dedicated to identifying the artist behind the haunting track and it seems they’d finally found the source. “By July 2nd,” Caress recalls, “they were having a Discord verification party in my honor.”
What began as a surreal curiosity turned into something deeper. Digging out an old thumb drive, Caress listened to those long-lost songs for the first time in nearly two decades. “That period of my life was so full of uncertainty,” he reflects. “Many of the lyrics are questions to an unknown listener… now I’m able to answer many of those questions.”
In reconnecting with the music he’d once dismissed as youthful and unpolished, Caress found something profound: “I’ve come to understand that no matter how small or unimportant you think it is, the art we make is meaningful and valuable.”
What started as a forgotten song on a CD became a story of rediscovery of music, memory, and the enduring voice of a younger self asking questions only time could answer.
