For January there was a small uptick in the number of cuts from the Cars, as Sloan decided he really liked "Moving In Stereo", for which I can't blame him. A strangely sticky set of earworms showed up when various tracks from "Tails" by the early 90s GenX heartthrob and one-hit wonder Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories began playing, without me even pulling out the CD. My best guess is that the winter season makes one think of having a "Snow Day", and the rest follows. 

 

New bedtime listening choice has started to appear on the list, I put on Star by Belly on the living room stereo and Sloan came in and declared he had to listen to it in his room. So Tanya Donnelly's seminal 90s alternative album has a new fan thirty years later. It is a marvelous album, so many good cuts to choose from. My brain seems to like Gepetto, Feed The Tree, and Slow Dog to play as earworms.

A little late on this update, but I decided to lower the processing burden on both the website and Apple Numbers. With over 10,000 rows in the spreadsheet I should probably switch over to some form of database application, which would (I'm assuming) have optimized code to deal with large numbers of entries. But that's a project for a different day. 

Instead, I split the spreadsheet into two parts: the first is an archive of sorts, dating from the beginning of the project to the end of 2019. It's sorted ascending by date, to you can get an idea of the flow of things. The second is the more current items, from 2020 to the present, and is sorted descending by date, so you can see what's new. Both are more on the order of 5,000 entries, and I tweaked some of the cell calculations which should reduce even more of the processing load. Sometimes when I opened the sheet on my phone it would leave some of the calculated date cells blank while it blinked "Processing" at me. 

As for entries, Frente! was still strong, as was a blast from the past, Jaco Pastorius, a self-taught bass player from the 70s who made his name in Weather Report. I hadn't listened to that disc for a looooooooong time, so it was nice to revisit.

 

This month didn't see too many standouts, mostly what might have been on the CD player in the car or at the studio. Frente! had a new one on the chart with "1-9-0", a track from the Austrailian release of "Marvin The Album" that wasn't included on the US release. Fortunately, I found a 15th anniversary compliation release of "Marvin The Album" with all US, UK and Australian tracks included, plus a bonus disc with their EP material. I'm surprised "1-9-0" got cut, it's a fabulous track.

Shoutout to a couple more brain faves this month, Blondie, "Stayin' Alive" (don't ask) and the early 90s alternative band Sun 60.

 

No particular song stood out this month, but an album did: Sloan started listening to Twang Twang Shock-A-Boom Live At Pearl's, and many of those songs took up residence in my head.

For those not there at the time: Twang Twang Shock-A-Boom was a short-lived but wildly popular acoustic trio from Austin, Texas that got their start playing outdoor pickup sets at the University of Texas at Austin in 1990. The songs were silly, catchy, fun and hearkened back to the Violent Femmes, so of course they exploded into The New Hotness. The only problem was, none of the three (Davíd Garza, Chris Searles and Jeff Haley) ever thought their silly busking would amount to anything, they had other career ideas in mind, and some label suits in New York hated their audition when they presented their songs. So Twang Twang Shock-A-Boom collapsed after ten months and never recovered.

Fortunately, I was able to record their last live show when it was broadcast on KLBJ-FM in October 1990 (yes, on cassette tape), and digitized it a few years back. Now such persona favorites as Your Only 8 Ball, Nicotine Queen and Big Stick live on in Sloan's CD player.

And Twang Twang has personal resonance for me, because I ran into one of their early outdoor shows before they exploded (yup, proto-hipster here), picked up quite a bit of unconscious lessons about how to craft a song from these creations, and even jumped on stage with a friend to help Davíd sing Ob La Dee Ob La Da by the Beatles at one of their club gigs. Excellent early college memories!

 

This month Suzanne Vega and The (English) Beat vied for top spot in The Played CD That Earwormed The Most category, but other than that, it was business as usual.

 

One of the things about my new chronic migraine presentation, it definitely seems to amp up the volume on earworms, and makes specific songs more sticky. Case in point: I pulled out a favorite album of mine from the 90s, Martinis & Bikinis by Sam Philips, and for the next ten or so days almost the entire album popped into my head song-wise for a romp through my audio cortex. It's a great album, and it'd been a while since I'd listened to it, but I didn't expect quite the echo effect it would have.

 

It was a pretty normal time, lots of Frente! because of Sloan's car CD preferences, and then I put on Moon Safari by French Band AIR, and suddenly my brain was back in 2002.

 

A pretty normal selection for most of the month, until my chronic migraine brain decided to obsess on two unlikely songs while it was migraining: The Man Comes Around by Johnny Cash and Here Comes The Rain Again by Eurythmics. Always a surprise, the interactions between various brain modules.

 

New year, new fun stuff in the Top 20s and Yearly Fun sections. Also, 2024 was interesting in that there was a large jump in the number of recorded earworms, from 944 in 2023 to 1211 in 2024. Not sure the dynamic behind that, it's possible that moving to recording each earworm in a Numbers spreadsheet on my phone has made it easier to annotate earworms as they happen, rather than posting to social media, as 2023 also saw an increase in number of posts.