Right now my brain keeps replaying *Crazy *by Gnarls Barkley. Just the chorus over and over. And I keep seeing Kick-Ass and Red Mist dancing to it in the Mistmobile, too. It’s cool, because I really like the song, and that scene is funny. Sometimes I get songs I don’t like stuck in my head (like The Song That Never Ends from Lamb Chop–sorry, guys). I can generally just listen to something else and get that stuck instead, though.
I’m very musically-inclined, and played sax in various bands for the better part of a decade. So, when my brain is playing a song, I “hear” the entire thing. Lyrics, melody, instrumentals. It’s hard for me to imagine remembering a song any other way.
I *love *all the songs she sings. Time to hit up youtube and listen to *Want You Gone *again! And Jon Coulton’s version of it is also neat.
I don’t listen to music much, as music (by which I mean, I don’t have an ipod or a CD collection, or listen to the radio, etc), but obviously I encounter it a lot in applied contexts and in the real world. I guess I watch some music videos on YouTube, amongst other stuff.
When I replay it, I hear it in my head in full detail. I can feel that my ears aren’t actually involved, but it’s a more real and complete experience than when I purposely try to visualise an image - which can sometimes be a bit insubstantial and difficult to firmly grasp.
At the moment, in my head, I’ve got the Peter Hollens acapella version of the Skyrim theme playing over and over - and I’m enjoying it.
In my case, “what’s your current earworm?” is actually a better question than “do you currently have an earworm?” Like unclogged sinuses, unwormed ears are something I appreciate as much for their rarity as for their usefulness.
Usually it’s a fragment of a song, sometimes the whole song. If it’s a fragment, I normally can remove it by forcing it to move beyond the coda point (think it in its entirety if I know it all, listen to it if I don’t). It can be something I’ve heard recently or triggered by mind association. And judging by that guy whistling Jingle Bells in the parking lot of the mall yesterday, I’m not the only one who gets attacks of Christmas carols in July…
Neat, I knew Loquillo’s No más héroes had to be a cover but had no idea which was the original. That’s it.
In my case it’s almost never something I’ve heard recently, at least not consciously (unless it’s a brief burst from a passing car or something over a store’s loudspeaker that I registered subconsciously without really hearing).
Sometimes I can backtrack through my thoughts and figure out what led to it, though. A couple of days ago the Blues Image song “Ride Captain Ride” was going through my head, which baffled me because I’m pretty sure it’s been years on end since I heard it or thought of it— then it hit me that I’d read something about Sally Ride earlier in the day.
I hear the music so clearly that when I’m singing in the shower I have a hard time fast-forwarding through the instrumental bits to get to where the lyrics come back in.
Fortunately for me – and anyone within hearing range of our shower – I can sing. I match by ear if I’m singing along with something, but when doing vocals without a guide, I’m more likely to go with the kinesthetics, and remember how it felt when I hit the right note before.
Interestingly, I think this contributes to some weird problems I had when I was trying unsuccessfully to learn the guitar. I could tune the guitar to itself, to another guitar, to a piano, or to a voice, but I could not do a damn thing with one of those cheap sine wave tuners. The waveform is so different that they didn’t sound at all alike to me, even when the sensor on the tuner swore blind the guitar and the chip were putting out the same note.
In my mind, I basically hear the song exactly as it would be, but the emphasis is usually on the lyrics, which (if I am thinking hard enough) gets me to sing along.
Oh, it’s so great to know I’m not alone in my affliction - the human jukebox. I pretty much love it unless something I hate gets in there, but I can usually shuffle something else in there to override it. I also keep a few “antidotes” on hand like others posted - “I Love You More Today Than Yesterday” is convenient and cheery.
I get the full orchestration, harmonies, percussion etc. I sometimes can entertain myself by playing an entire album in my head - Beatles records are good for that. I also get the mash up/medley thing - someone upthread mentioned “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley. Did you know you can mash that up real nice with Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”? I do now.
I also have had this problem since forever and just recently it has been driving me mad. The only way it stops is when I am watching TV, talking to someone or listening to other music. Yesterday it was The William Tell Overture, but it can also be a jingle from the TV. I often find that I am clenching my teeth to the beat. There is never a time, except asleep and as above that I don’t have it.
I have thought about having hypnosis to remove the problem. I wonder if this would work?
Nothing much has changed for me–I still get music stuck in different ways, though I don’t get the lyrics-only version as often anymore. Mostly, I get the full sound of the song stuck, and if I don’t have a separate memory of the lyrics, they’re rendered as sound, not words. Lyrics seem to be processed separately in the brain.
I can get a song stuck on a single hearing, and I tend to hear it exactly like it was the first time I heard it, or exactly like the most recent time.
And Jon Coulton’s version of it is also neat.