There was always mystery upon mystery layered in The X-Files, the popular sci-fi series starring David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, and now a big meta one regarding the show itself has been solved. The Washington Post reports on a melancholy country-western song heard in the background of a Season 6 episode that aired in 1998, in a scene in which Duchovny's character, Fox Mulder, is spotted at a rural Nevada bar. For years, fans of the show had wondered about the tune, but one in particular was really mystified by it, and her efforts have now led to the identification of the song after a quarter century.
"Just had the weirdest experience," Lauren Ancona wrote of what happened earlier this month while she was watching an X-Files rerun at her parents' house outside Philly, which is when she heard the catchy song and decided to run it through Shazam, a program designed to ID songs. Ancona says Shazam's efforts were futile, but her curiosity wouldn't die down, so she started a Twitter thread in pursuit of the song's origins. Others soon jumped in on the viral post with suggestions, and the thread caught the eye of composer Rob Cairns, who happened to know one of the song's co-writers, Dan Marfisi, per NPR. Marfisi jokes to the Post, "The first thing you think of when somebody goes, 'Hey, we're viral on Twitter!' is ... 'What have I done stupid lately?'"
Marfisi reveals that he'd penned the tune, titled "Staring at the Stars," with Glenn Jordan for that specific X-Files scene. "We had a directive to write something that would fit both an alien and a human being," he tells NPR. "And we kind of looked up in the sky and said, 'What's up there besides aliens?' And we found stars ... that was our brainstorming session." The duo says they put the song together in about four hours. The songwriters say they now plan to release the song on streaming services and are mulling releasing other country songs they wrote together long ago. As for Ancona, she says, "What is better than discovering this thing that people have been looking for 25 years for." (More The X-Files stories.)
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