Ulterior Motives, or Everyone Knows That, is a song that was found and posted to the internet a few years ago. It was an extremely low quality 80’s pop song that nobody on the internet could identify, and an internet-wide search between thousands of people, news stations, radio stations, etc. raised no leads.
The song was considered lost, a mystery, until a Reddit user discovered the song in an 80’s porn film. It was quickly identified that the original poster withheld the information that it was from a porn film, in hopes that he would not out himself for watching it. Suddenly, the creator of the song, Christopher Saint Booth, was bombarded with thousands of messages asking about the song. One of the best possible outcomes to this situation unfolded, which was that he and his brother, who made the original song, would dig through their old tapes and try to recover the song for people to listen to. They have been incredibly responsive to the community and the sudden uproar of attention, and have been nothing but positive and excited to share their work to the people that want to hear it.
Unfortunately, however, it turns out that Ulterior Motives is, indeed, completely lost to time. The Booth brothers were able to restore the percussion track and “rhythm track” but unfortunately had to remake the rest of the song. When they recorded the original track, 40 years ago, they were in their twenties.
My initial suspicions were apprehensive, and I will be honest in saying that. The first track that released was Chemistry, as a single, several weeks ago. This song was found completely in tact and was a solid representation of their work in the 80’s. The song was remastered by the brothers and cleaned up a bit.
On June 22, a baker’s dozen of their tracks released, with Ulterior Motives. This is my honest review of the content. I will preface all this by saying that I deeply appreciate that this exists at all, and I’m not trying to nitpick or complain, as much as just simply review the music. I would rather have what was released than nothing at all, and the efforts are not unnoticed here.
So, in my opinion, Ulterior Motives is actually probably one of the weakest songs on the album. In general, I feel it pales in comparison to a lot of the other tracks. The circumstances are incredibly unfortunate. It’s a damn shame and it pains me to say it but the fact it had to be remade hurts the song a lot. I generally find that they paid very little attention to the details of what made the original lost song special – several choruses are missing and he splices his new, redone vocals in with vocals from 40 years ago, likely because he could not hit specific notes anymore. The old vocals are not separated from the OG track, either, so you have these double-layered out of sync drums at random points. Whether you want to believe it or not, you cannot splice a 20 something year old and 60 something year old together and have it sound natural. The end of the song also differs greatly and the song runs for much longer than the original.
This is actually an issue most songs on this album have. I find there’s a lot of really solid concepts on here but the songs absolutely do not need runtimes of 5 minutes or longer. I understand, however, that this is not an issue that should have been altered or changed and was simply just a result of the songs being written this way in the first place.
In my opinion, the Booth brothers are not in touch with producing this style of music. A lot of the masters sound very strange to me, and I would have honestly rather have had them release the music without altering it. I can’t really put my finger on it.
With Ulterior Motives, it would have been extremely beneficial if they had just released what could have been salvaged of the song as-is and allowed the community to work with it. Dedicated people WOULD have been able to piecemeal the song back together. But that’s probably not going to happen.
Other noteworthy tracks in my opinion are So In Love, You Turn Me On and Lie School. I would vote all three of those tracks are better than Ulterior Motives.
I can’t really rate this album. These are essentially gifts from what was once a lost cause, and brought to the public eye via an incredible, once in a life time instance. Despite the remake of Ulterior Motives not being exactly like the original, there is obviously life and love put into this project and for that I commend the Booth Brothers for jumping to the cause and making this happen. They absolutely didn’t have to do this, the fact this album exists is an extremely rare, incredible human phenomenon and one of the most interesting outcomes to one of the most intriguing internet stories of all time.
