convincing yourself that a song/album/artist is much older or newer than it actually is

When we're very young, we lack the reference points that allow us to guess, with reasonable accuracy, the approximate age of a song we hear on the radio or elsewhere. It can be disorienting to learn, several years down the road, that what you'd once considered a new song is really something your dad might've listened to as a boy. If you live under a rock like I do, you'll continue making this mistake until you're old enough to know better. Here are a few of my boring examples:

-When I was a little kid, I somehow got the idea that "Brown Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison was one of the oldest and uncoolest songs you'd ever hear on the radio. It certainly predated rock 'n' roll, and I figured it came out in the early '50s, if not before that.

-In 1997 or so I was convinced that "What I Am" by Edie Brickell was a brand new single. I must've heard it before then, but the seemingly constant airplay led me to believe that it was a current Top 40 hit. I lumped it alongside Alanis Morrisette and other screechy female singer-songwriters of the day.

-In 2000 I made the same mistake (minus the Alanis comparison) with Weezer's "Buddy Holly" and "The Sweater Song." A blissfully clueless feature in my local newspaper assured me that they were a promising new band on the verge of superstardom.

-A couple years ago, I blindly downloaded a few Life Without Buildings tracks (including "New Town"), knowing only that they were pegged as a post-punk act. I thought they were an undiscovered gem from, like, 1983, and I forgot about them until a few months later when I was surprised to learn how recently they'd recorded.

Do you guys have any better examples of this?

I remember I was almost certain that "Perfect" by Fairground Attraction was a re-release of some 60s hit.

^^^^ Me too! I was like, "Was this a Patsy Cline song or something?"

it wasn't until some time last year that I learned that The Stranglers weren't a band who had one big hit in the '60s and could be considered alongside, say, Procul Harum. I had half-wondered why a '60s band with a song like 'Golden Brown' would be called The Stranglers, and had surely heard more of their music, but I never bothered making any connections anywhere, I guess.

this is a little different because they're consciously going for an old sound, but when i first heard the menahan street band song that "roc boys" sampled i had no idea that it was the daptones dudes. i just assumed that it was actually some forgotten deep cut, and when i found out i was like "oooh they got me!"

Great thread concept!

I probably have tons of these, but all I can think of right now is a guy I knew in the late 90s who thought Dark Side of the Moon came out in the early 90s based on the date on the CD. He was - even so! - struck by how ahead-of-its-time the album sounded. In hindsight, I have to admit that it doesn't sound anything like 1993, and probably would have been a welcome breath of fresh air on the rock landscape at the time.

I know there are a few cases where album art and a band name, nothing else, have given me the impression of something being much newer and cooler than it is...damn, this is gonna drive me nuts trying to remember.

As I got into FM radio in 1981, I had a hard time distinguishing between Billy Squire and Led Zeppelin. I knew Zeppelin was better, so I was totally shocked when my cousin tried to convince me that "My Kind of Lover" wasn't Zep.

1979, just starting to pay close attention to rock radio and new wave, heard "All Day And All Of The Night" and assumed the Kinks were some cool punkish new band (figured out I was wrong pretty quick, though.)

^!!!!!!