Updated July 2026

• Updates Blog and Feedback Page for latest info.

• FAQs on Page 2   for quick answers.
• Pages 3 - 7    for general research narrative.
• Pages 8 - 12   for research archives.

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Song Summary

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Light the Lanterns is an enigmatic electric-folk song featuring an emotive female vocal, some mildly trippy slide guitar, and a funky fretless bass.

Originating on some magic island with a mythological background, the song's lyrics allude to the homecoming of shipwrecked sailors, some crazy ladies in gingerbread houses, a drunken "Grace" in a Chinese restaurant, and a will to live colliding with love.

The singer recounts when the lights of an illumination night memorial were about to be extinguished. But she vows to continue the legacy and proposes salvation by inviting everyone to light the lanterns.

This truly orphan-work was discovered on an untitled demo cassette in a disused Los Angeles office in the mid 1980s. Despite some 200,000 YouTube views and a seven-year nationwide search, the artist's identity still remains a complete mystery. True, the singer is not yet found -- but we are closing in!

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My Website Approach -- Connecting the Dots

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This website contains the results of my digging up historical, geographical, musical and sociological facts about the mystery song. To ensure  transparency, my approach can be classified in 3 ways:

​[Fact] — Verifiable source documents, photos, emails with musical historians experts, audio, videos, online forum statements, military archives.

[Deduction] — Circumstantial alignment where the historical data points overwhelmingly in one logical direction.

​[Speculation] — Informed theories are used to fill in the narrative gaps, based on either research context or my own music industry experience. I am continually trying to prove or disprove my own speculations to further the factuality of this research. All references are either internally linked within these pages or externally on the www.

​To narrow down the field of research, my methodology has looked into the following areas:

• Musical experts have been consulted.
• Genealogy of the characters has been investigated.​
• Coastal maritime history has been verified.
• Musicology genres, instrumentation and production have been examined by experts and examples provided. ​
• Popular myths about the song have been debunked.

This investigation is a narrative discovery. My thesis has developed and gradually solidified over the years. By distinguishing between what is proven and what is inferred, these pages present a disciplined, working hypothesis built upon both facts and cumulative circumstantial evidence to unravel this mysterious song. 

To follow this research, I suggest moving through the website pages in their numbered order 3 - 7.  For those wanting a deeper dive, please explore the actual RESEARCH ARCHIVES, Pages 8 - 12. You will then be well-acquainted with the song's true backstory and how you can best help the search.

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A Bit About Me

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I've been intensively researching this project for some 5 years now. I'm a retired 70-year-old Australian who was playing folk and pop publicaly in my teens from 1968 to 1975 -- harmonising songs just like this with my girlfriend. It feels so familiar to the era of my youth.

I then worked in the music industry in the 70s and 80s in bars, clubs, pubs -- variously as a roadie, sound and light mixer, band manager, and publicist. So I experienced a history parallel to the artists of this song.

In 2025 I engaged with some professional sound engineers and musicians to fully analyse the original Light the Lanterns recording. We then produced a digitally re-mastered, stereo hi-fi MP3. This is partially from cleaned-up stem tracks, and partially overlaid with note-for-note rendition tracks of the original song. This is the only copy on the web which is not a muddy copy of a muddy copy.

• To begin the journey and see how this song was first discovered;
• What the lyrics really mean;
• And then how real-world history perfectly matches the song ...

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