When someone tells me that one of my songs got stuck in his/her head, I take it as a high compliment. After all, how great is it to know that a song I wrote is echoing in a person’s brain, over and over?
However, I also know how awful it can be when someone’s sticky song gets stuck in my head. Sure, it might be a song I like, but must I listen to it over and over and over until I want to scream?
I even have songs I can hardly listen to because I know they will immediately cause an earworm. Really, any Abba song, listened to late in the evening, can cause a sleepless night. I’m not even immune to indie tunes: I consider my friend Mark Allen Berube positively brilliant when it comes to creating sticky songs, to the point that I refuse to even include his album “Suspicious Fish” on my iPod in case it comes on shuffle and I go through my day endlessly singing “The Naked Guy at the Gym” or “Grandma Gave me the Finger.”
I asked the Songwriting Scene communities on Facebook and Twitter for their sticky song feedback. Here’s what some songwriters had to say:
Kay Ashley: “Years ago I saw Leo Kottke in concert and he talked about earworms. His worst earworm was ‘Yummy, Yummy, Yummy I’ve Got Love in My Tummy” and the only way he could get it out of his head was to transcribe the tune onto paper and then sing it backwards. His theory was that he canceled it out mathematically.”
Tara Covington: “How about ‘Fly Me to the Moon”….I want to send it to the moon. I can’t understand why, hippie child that I was…of all the things that could worm way down deep into my head. I get caught humming it at work a few times a week. Anybody know an antidote for major earworm humming disease?:
Lydia Wagner: “My vote: Dancin’ in the Moonlight by King Harvest. the second you hear those notes in the intro…sooo catchy.”
Michael Leahy: “The two stickiest composers I know are Abba and Johann Strauss. Others might try hard, but never get there.”
What’s your vote for the stickiest song? What causes your earworms? Do tell!
