Everyone Knows That: Long-Lost Song Has Been Found

A 1980s song that sparked a years-long internet search has finally been identified.

By Russ Burlingame

"Ulterior Motives" -- alternately known as "Everyone Knows That" -- has been identified after years of effort by dozens of internet sleuths. A clip from the song was originally uploaded to WatZatSong (a site that helps fans identify songs when apps like Shazam fail) in 2021, and went unidentified until this weekend. During that time, it attracted the attention of online communities of lost media searchers and "lostwave" enthusiasts, who seek to find or identify missing or unattributed songs. The song and the search around it even attracted mainstream media attention, getting written up in The Guardian and Rolling Stone, but it was two Redditors who finally found it.

The song, as it turns out, was by filmmakers and composers Christopher Saint Booth and Philip Adrian Booth. As far as we can tell now, it first appeared in Angels of Passion, a 1986 adult film from CB Productions and director Jerome Bronson.

"Well today, my mind has officially been blown," Christopher Saint Booth posted to Instagram after learning about the years-long search. "WOW!"

His post included a famous photo of a pink Nextplay boombox in a room filled with pink cushions and pillows. While it wasn't posted with the original request for information about "Ulterior Motives," it quickly became associated with the song because it just "felt" right to people. One YouTuber already took it upon themselves to play "Ulterior Motives" on an identical pink Nextplay boombox and share it with the internet.

The original uploader on WhatZatSong was a user named Carl92. He has not yet responded to the discovery (and may not, because the realization that it appeared in an adult movie has made him the butt of a thousand jokes). It was eventually discovered by Redditors u/One-Truth-5867 and u/south_pole_ball, who were operating on a hunch that it was a song by the Booth brothers. "One Truth" has been posting actively since the discovery went public, and promised to do an AMA-style post on the "Everyone Knows That" subreddit soon to discuss the process of finding the song.

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There doesn't appear to be any official release for Angels of Passion, but it has been archived on at least one adult website, and the link has been circulating on Reddit and Discord since it was discovered.

The Booths score for TV and film, with clients that include Syfy, Sony, and Prime Video. They make horror movies that appear on Prime Video and Tubi. ComicBook.com reached out to them for comment, but we have not yet received a comment. Given how many inquiries One Truth says they have received, it's probably safe to assume the Booth brothers are equally swamped. Fans have been trying to convince them to release the song commercially, like what happened when a pair of unidentified songs from King of the Hill were found last year.

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