If I am bored and specifically start jamming out to a song in my head, that doesn’t count as an earworm, right?
Because I mentally jam on a daily basis and usually to same songs.
But unintentionally having a song stuck in my head:
Monthly
Breaking the Habit by Linkin Park. God I hate the emo band LP so much, but if I hear this song for some reason, the chorus gets stuck in my head and drives me crazy! And now I’ve inflicted it upon myself for the sake of science. Cecil better recognize my sacrifices.
No strategy. I just try to make the best of a bad situation and half heartedly jam out to the song that’s stuck in my head. In the vain attempt to trick myself into thinking the song is intentionally stuck in my head.
I seem especially suscptible to them in the morning. If I’m listening to the radio news when getting ready for work, I eaily will get advertising jungles stuck. Bugs my family, because I’ll often sing them out loud. Not only do I have a lousy singing voice, but then my family gets infected with them! For songs, it seems show tunes, novelty songs, or TV themes stick with me most frequently. The last one I remember is Lollipop. (Lollipop lollipop, oh lolly lolly lolly lollipop.)
Don’t do anything special. They go away - or at least fade - pretty quickly.
Do I occasionally more-or-less spontaneously think of a tune from 5, 10, or 20 years ago? Sure. And after mentally singing the 1 or 2 lines of lyrics I remember & humming the chorus I’m off to think about something else utterly unrelated and probably not musical.
I’m surprised we’re to post 24 (response 23) and nobody else said they don’t have a mental mp3 player stuck on repeat.
I enjoy music, but I never understood the desire to have it on all the time. Even as a teen, I treated music as something to listen to (and pay attention to) for awhile, not something to have playing in the background 24/7.
Old TV theme songs: “Bonanza”, “Ballad of Davy Crockett” and the one from “Daniel Boone” are the 3 that first come to mind right now. But others of that ilk and era are common. Some sort of early childhood imprinting I think.
You can’t get rid of them. If you could they wouldn’t be earworms. Sheesh.
The opening theme of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto; the title theme from the 1967 movie *Thoroughly Modern Millie, *sung by Julie Andrews; the opening theme of Mendelssohn’s “Italian Symphony”; Dein Ist Mein Ganzes Hertz, from Lehar’s “Land of Smiles”; Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony: 2nd Movement; Last movement of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto; theme song of the “Mary Tyler Moore Show”; The Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da” or “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”
And many, many others.
The only way is to replace it with another.
Reading this thread, and being reminded of all these songs, has created a state of “dueling earworms” in my brain.
Daily. I pretty much always have a soundtrack running in the back of my head, usually of song fragments rather than an entire song.
I don’t remember now, as they change pretty frequently, but the one I’ve had in my head for the last hour or two is the lullabye from Lady and the Tramp that Darling sings to the baby. La-la-loo or something like that. A really repetitive piece of a song can last for days - an example is the “into the ocean, end it all” part of the song Into the Ocean by Blue October.
The only way I’ve found to banish an earworm is to find an even more obnoxious earworm. It’s A Small World works sometimes. I’ve Never Been To Me is another one that works, but then I’m stuck with that one for days so I try to avoid doing that. And now I have it again. Dammit!
I get them whenever I’m especially tired it seems - lying awake at 4 AM is pretty much guaranteed to be accompanied by a song stuck on a 17 second tape loop inside my skull.
[ul]
[li]White Wedding by Billy Idol[/li][li]If you leave me now by Chicago[/li][li]Kansas City from the musical ‘Oklahoma!’[/li][li]The theme tune to ‘Around the world with Willy Fog’[/li][/ul]
Always. There is always music playing in my head. (At the moment, it’s Dream by Forest for the Trees).
In the past few days, I’ve had Nik Kershaw’s Riddle, some Depeche Mode, a Hindi song called Mahive, a TV show theme song I don’t recall, a kid’s song…I dunno, it’s all over the place. For a while there, the Beatles’ Ob la di, ob la da would play for days and I got to hate that song. Oh, a couple of weeks ago it was a certain hymn–“How Firm a Foundation” and another one I don’t remember now.
Find another song to replace it. I have to go turn on some music and listen to a song. It doesn’t always work.
I disagree. I’ve never been one to have music on all the time–I like quiet–but I can never get rid of the music in my head. My mom can’t either. It’s pretty annoying not to be able to just have mental quiet when you’re trying to concentrate.
Daily. I normally wake up with a song in my head. Sometimes I “hear” snippets of text, just a few lines repeating instead of music.
*You are my Sunshine *-- I don’t know the singer, but he’s a tenor.
The tune to Bransel Official, it’s the same tune as the Christmas carol “ding dong merrily on high”. No particular artist or recording. Workin’ at the Car Wash…I googled, and I think it’s the Rose Royce version.
If I can sing the song through to the end, or just until a chord resolves, sometimes it goes away.
Singing another song sometimes works and sometimes leaves me with the earworm of the second song. The most successful eradication without infection tune is 16the century Kyrie Eleison I learned a while back.
Turning on the radio also helps, as the tune in my head will pause while there’s other music playing. Sometimes it restarts after I turn the radio off, and sometimes a new song starts.
Often it’s some nonsense ditty that I’ve made up to sing to my daughter. Other than that, “Here comes the rain again” by the Eurythmics, “If you’re happy and you know it”, and various Christmas Carols.
My strategy is highly specific. There’s a song by They Might Be Giants, “Hey Mr. DJ,” that invariably cleanses the earworms. I sing the first two verses, and the earworm is gone. For some reason, “Hey Mr. DJ” doesn’t stick in my head.
Daily, I’m sure, it’s really troubling when I’m trying to go to sleep because it’s usually not high quality stuff.
The Final Countdown by Journey, the Yo! Gabba Gabba theme song along with various other Nick Jr tunes, the tune from the Monchichi toy commercial when i was a kid, The Day Before You Came by ABBA, various songs by They Might be Giants, Little Spanish Flea by Herb Alpert and the gang, but of Mozart’s Requiem.
I usually try to push it out with something equally catchy but less aggressive- a favorite is the Girl from Ipanema as performed by Pizzicato Five.
Two I can remember from today are All the Single Ladies by Beyonce and In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins.
Sometimes they will go away on their own, but for a persistent earworm, I sing Hey Jude by the Beatles. I will then have Hey Jude running through my head for a few minutes, but it is much more pleasant to listen to and easier to get rid of than most.
The one I recall most recently is “La Bamba” by Richie Valens. I think it was because a snippet of the song appeared in a radio commercial.
[funny aside - after having it in my head for like 3 days, I got out of my car to walk into a restaurant and I immediately heard a trumpet flourish and then a mariachi band playing “La Bamba.” I thought I was losing my mind via earwig-come-to-life. Turns out there was actually a mariachi band playing “La Bamba” live at a Mexican restaurant across the street from where I was parked. I still think it was weird. Hell, it was weird that I had the song in my head at all]
Ben Folds’ “You Don’t Know Me” was a recent one that was really bad. Especially because I didn’t know all the words. The song is catchy as hell and was actually keeping me up nights. I listened to it a bunch so I could learn the words and stop it from “skipping” in my head.
If it’s a song in my library, I’ll just play the song. Once I hear it, and my playlist moves on to something else, it’s fine. If it’s something really annoying that I would never have in my library, I tell someone else (usually my business partner) so I can “pass it on” to them. They usually give me something to replace it with (my business partner tends to like “(I’m Gonna Be) 500 Miles” by The Proclaimers. Awful.)
I can’t remember, and I had one just this morning that I was trying to track to its source. I’m the counterexample to what LSLGuy said about not listening to music. I have not intentionally listened to music in about 5 years. All of the music I hear is incidental, in movies, television shows, department stores, elevators, etc. Most of my earworms develop when I hear a word or phrase that happens to appear in a particular song. My favorite story about this took place in the beginning of this year. I noticed that whenever I used my home computer, “Moon River” would get stuck in my head. I always keep the sound on my computer turned off, so I knew it wasn’t something I was hearing. After several weeks, I traced the source to a little note I had sitting next to my computer that included Joan Rivers’ name. Every time I sat down at my computer, my brain went “Joooooan Rivers, wider than a mile, I’m crossing you in style someday…” and I was off. I moved my little note into a closed cabinet, and that problem was solved. One other example is the song “It’s Been a Long Day” from “How to Succeed in Business”. Every time someone says “It’s been a long day,” or even if I just think it, that one comes back.
I sing. The new song might or might not get stuck in my head, but it definitely gets rid of the old song.
