I’ve always had something of a continuous radio station running in my head, and distinctly remember being highly annoyed when “Right By Your Side” by the Eurythmics got stuck in my head for an entire week in 1985. (It wasn’t that I hated the song, I just didn’t want to hear that much of the song.) The project itself wasn’t something that immediately coalesced as such; it was an on-again-off-again personal lark for at least two years, and it didn’t become codified and organized for five. It basically began just because I had a flip phone that could connect to Twitter and I was bored on my commute. But, barring a lull for most of 2012, it quickly became something of an on-going performance art or procedural art piece, and the habit was established.

In the beginning I used the @mindhue Mindhue Studio Twitter feed, then bounced to my personal Facebook for a bit, then decided to use my @EdwardSemblance literary alter ego as the earworm channel. Finally, in 2018, I decided that the earworm feed deserved its own login, and @FreshEarworms was born. Sadly, after Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X, I decided he didn’t need my help in enabling right-wing authoritarianism, so I deleted all my Twitter accounts. I attempted to post them to the social media site VERO, which got no traction at all. FInally, I settled on the idea of recording them continually in a Numbers spreadsheet on my iPhone, This website contains the unified and almalgamated set of all earworm data, and will be updated monthly.

I did collect all the available earworms together in an actual published volume in 2020. It’s still for sale on Blurb, if you’re interested in having a concrete piece of earworm history.