Saturday morning. My wife and I are both on our laptops. She’s grading research papers, and I’m just goofing around when Scoopski emails me a tune he’s working on. Needless to say, it’s awesome. I love the chunky guitar tone, but I can’t quite put my finger on where I’ve heard it before, so I play it for my wife.

“What does that sound like?” I ask. “The guitar. It’s an 80s tune, right? Like a power ballad or something?”

“I don’t know,” she says.

I know it’s going to bug me, so I start searching for the song online — a task made all the more difficult by the fact that I don’t know the title or the artist.

I start by searching “80s Power Ballads” on YouTube. No dice, and I get sidetracked watching the video for a Wilson Phillips song that’s neither a power ballad nor from the 80s.

Something tells me it might be by Chicago, so I find their YouTube channel and play the opening riffs of some of their songs. Close, but not quite.

So I Google “Bands that sound like Chicago.” (Technically, I use DuckDuckGo, but I’m not sure that works as a verb.) Peter Cetera is an obvious possibility, but again it’s a no. Then I roll the dice again and try Toto. Definitely not “Africa” or “Rosanna,” but maybe…

“Here it is!” I say a half hour after asking my initial question. “Listen!”

“Did you just spend the last half hour looking for that?”

“Of course,” I say. “I’d be crazy not to, right?”

Her silence speaks volumes.

In any case, when you listen to the next single from Scoopski and start to wonder where you’ve heard that guitar tone before, the answer is Toto.