Interesting thing how the environment shapes your mind, and how your mind reacts to situations, triggers, reminders and situations. Your mind can (evidently) also go off on a tear and just start frequently jamming to a personal fave. 

The bulk of the earworm list, and a good portion of this list, is a pretty accurate cross-section of my exposure to and tastes in music. However, there are some mitigating circumstances that make this particular list amusing. Some notes on the five major outliers:

September by Earth Wind & Fire: my favorite season is the fall, and that month is the beginning of the season, so this song tends to impinge itself around the first of the month. It’s also pretty catchy, has a great bassline and I like it quite a bit. So it sticks around for a while.

Turn Me Loose by Loverboy: It’s not a bad song, and I did enjoy it when it was on the hit parade, but it’s not that good. The problem with “Turn Me Loose” is that the phrase and scansion fits perfectly with the phrase “Silly Goose”, which was (and still is) my primary nickname for my son. And it’s actually pretty funny to sing a song called “Silly Goose” with a three-year-old. But… then it stays in your brain.

Since You’re Gone by The Cars: This is one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite bands, but that’s not the reason it’s up at the top of the list. Just like “Turn Me Loose”, the refrain “Since you’re gone, life is getting strange” has the perfect scansion and a pretty good phonemic matchup to the phrase “Mister Dog, you’re a fuzzy face”. And, of course, that’s a good thing to sing to my dog Hopper while I’m doing the dishes or taking him for a walk. Instant earworm!

Oregon Hill by Cowboy Junkies: Another favorite artist of mine, but this cut from “Black Eyed Man” is maybe in the lower middle of my song preferences from them. The reason it’s high in this list is because my brain decided that whenever I would wake up on a weekend, later than usual, it would fixate on the line “me and Suzie are celebrating the joys of sleeping in”. And then it would stick around for the whole day. The Oregon Hill Era was mostly in the mid-teens, nowadays it doesn’t appear nearly as much, but back then it was a frequent lodger in my mind.

Finally, It’s Your Thing by The Isley Brothers is the perfect example of odd, inexplicable machinations deep within the synapses of my auditory cortex and language centers. It would just pop up for no reason at any time. Like “Oregon Hill”, it’s not longer quite so prevalent, but still made it to the Top 20.

OTHER NOTES:

Some Top 20 entries tend to be favorite songs from albums I’ve newly acquired and have been listening to pretty frequently. Raspberry Jam Delta V, The Things That You Say That You Do and Haley are examples of those songs.

Some are similar to It’s Your Thing — they’re just Brain Favorites. I.G.Y., Saturday In The Park, and Heavy Metal are examples of those. The funny thing about Brain Favorites is, I like the songs reasonably enough, but they’re not my favorites (except maybe for “IGY”), they just have a shape that fits perfectly into a hollow in my brain. Go figure!

Finally, as I addressed in the Top 20 Artists Notes, some of these are because of the albums my son insists on listening to while he fell asleep. So What, Rock This Town, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun and all the Steely Dan entries are examples of this effect. I will say, there are worse things for your kid to be listening to than Miles Davis, The Stray Cats, Cyndi Lauper and Steely Dan, right?

This year saw the mid-90s alternative band from Australia Frente take a large portion of time in the car CD player, at my son’s request. Thus, Goodbye Goodguy cracks the Top Twenty through repetition. 2023 was also The Year I Discovered Television, which was a band I’d always heard of but never bothered to try out. Obviously I had been depriving myself! The title track Marquee Moon hit the Top Twenty, but all other tracks were just as welcome.

A very interesting entry on this chart is, again, courtesy of my son. This year he discovered the three albums I had recorded in the late 90s – early 00s with two garage bands and one Macintosh. He enjoyed the garage band music immensely, and one of those songs, A Simple Drive by Conspiracy Theorists, shot up the Earworm List to reside in the lower middle ranks. If you would like to partake of this particular song and others in the EP we recorded, please follow this link. A bonus effect of this was that I got to listen to the songs I wrote and played on  20 years after the fact… and they didn’t suck. In fact, they were actually pretty good! : )

Another Sloan Song that jumped into the Top Twenty was Believer by Imagine Dragons. Not my favorite band, but not a bad song. I did hear it quite often the first half of 2024. usually watching the video on YouTube.

Finally, it was The Year Of John Coltrane, as I kept buying more CDs of his work, and Giant Steps wound up staying in the CD player for weeks at a time. I was susprised that it was Spiral that cracked the Top Twenty, not Giant Steps or Mr. PC, but all are welcome in my brain.