When I Can’t Get It Out Of My Head: My Earworms Of Note

Who hasn’t had it happen to them?

You’re innocently minding your own business when a line or two from a song intrudes into your head uninvited, gets itself lodged in there, and you can’t get it out.

Invariably, you find yourself singing it out loud, repeatedly, much to the annoyance of those around you.

Over at The Number Ones comment section at Stereogum, commenter Jon Deutsch asks weekly what earworm is stuck in people’s heads:

And he never fails to get lots of random responses.

The late record producer Steve Albini was on record as suggesting that when a song is stuck in your head, the solution is to start singing “Private Dancer” by Tina Turner, and it will quickly leave and take the stuck song along with it.

It doesn’t work.

When she was living with us for about a half a year, we quickly learned that my sister-in-law had the Elvis Presley song “It’s Now or Never” stuck in her head for what may have been years.

She would frequently sing just the four words from the title for no particular reason, loudly, with a slight Polish accent.

Though it may sound charming, I can assure you that it wasn’t.

But as someone who has been giving earworms in my head a get-out-of-jail-free card since childhood:

I am certainly not one to judge.

My earliest memory was around third grade, while trick-or-treating on Halloween.

Somehow, the line “He’s a demon on wheels” from the Speed Racer cartoon got stuck in my head and I felt the urge to sing it every time we left a house, but it came out as “He’s a demon on ice skates”.

I don’t know exactly why. Maybe because it was really cold out? 

If this sort of thing wasn’t bad enough, my sister Elise and I managed to create our own earworms. We once wrote a song called “Scratch”. (Scratch. I just can’t help it. Scratch. I just can’t help it. S-C-R-A-T-C-H, that’s scratch.) On a trip to Florida, we sang it over and over again in the car, until our dad got so fed up that not only were we ordered to stop, but we were permanently banned from ever singing the song again.

We also wrote a commercial jingle for a fictional cat food called Tender Bites, and we would frequently have our stuffed animals sing it. I still remember it note for note to this day.

In high school, I once stood up in the middle of Spanish class and sung the chorus of “Celebration” by Kool & The Gang at the top of my lungs, for no other reason than I just needed to get it out of my head.

Well, and I liked the attention, to be honest.

That same year, I also had a penchant for shouting “CRACK THAT WHIP” from “Whip It” by Devo at odd times throughout the school day. The best was in gym class when we were in the pool. 

The acoustics in there were amazing. 

I also remember sitting in a hallway after lunch with a bunch of guys, waiting for our next class.  I don’t remember who started it, but we all broke out into the very earworm-y theme song from the True Value Hardware commercial. Our history teacher, a burly assistant football coach, stepped out of his classroom, looked at us angrily and just said “SHUT UP” and lumbered back into his cave. 

A girl I knew once asked me to accompany her and another couple to a local amusement park. My mother told me that she had been told by the girl’s mother that it was a date, but this was not confirmed. If it had indeed been a date, I ruined any of my chances with the girl when we got in line to ride a rollercoaster called The Demon.

It had its own theme song, which was written specifically for those waiting in line.

I couldn’t get the song out of my head and kept singing a line from it for the remainder of the time we were at the park, to the point where the girl was screaming at me to stop. She never contacted me again after that day.

Freshman year in college, my roommate and I would often stay up until 1am to watch re-runs of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show.

A commercial for a car dealership on the South Side of Chicago, R.L. Dukes, would frequently run, and it only came on in the early hours of the morning, never sooner. 

I got so hooked on it and its catchy, funky theme music that I began staying up late just to see the commercial, and I got many of my friends doing the same thing. 

The trend even spread to a fraternity on another college campus. We talked about making a pilgrimage to the dealership, but we never did, and I greatly regret that. 

Sometimes, when freeing an earworm into the wild, it can be easy to forget that everyone around you, including complete strangers, can hear you singing. 

Once on a car ride to the mall with my friend Al, the chorus of the song “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” by the Beatles was on repeat in my head. As we got out of the car, I sang “Hey Bungalow Bill” and from somewhere nearby in the parking lot, I heard a voice sing back to me “what did you kill, Bungalow Bill?”

I never saw that person, but I felt a bond that day.

Earworms have continued to follow me throughout my life, sometimes even playing on a loop in my dreams. 

I know I’m not alone, so let me know some of your more memorable experiences of having a melody stuck in the old noggin. And in the spirit of commenter Jon Deutsch:

What song is playing in your head today?

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