JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: There’s been a lot of talk in the news the past few months about brain worms (yuch!!) but I want to steer the conversation in a different direction. You might say I want to bring it right round baby, right round, like a record baby right round round round.
Did I ear worm you?
Some of us are more susceptible than others, but everyone gets a tune stuck in their head once in a while. Honestly, I’m constantly humming or singing two bars of the last thing I heard in a show/ Alexa streaming/ an ad. Sometimes I wake up with a song already going in my head - what’s up with that? Is there some truth to the old conspiracy theory about radio receivers in dental fillings?
There are songs that for some reason or another seem destined to become earworms. Karma Chameleon. Oklahoma. Pretty much anything by Shakira. Then there are others that are more tailored to an individual. Lacking any other input, for instance, I will hum phrases from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro Overture. I will do this over and over and OVER again, something I don’t notice at all, but, sadly, anyone around me will experience. I have to be very alert when traveling by train because of this.
How about you, Reds? Are you afflicted by ear worms? What tunes are your triggers?
DEBORAH CROMBIE: I am, although probably not as much as more musical folks. I have been watching The Voice this season for the first time in a couple of years (Adam Levine is back as a coach, yay!) and a recent contestant–from Dallas, no less–sang a gorgeous version of Dream a Little Dream of Me and I’ve had it stuck in my head ever since!
LUCY BURDETTE: This mostly happens to me around Christmas. There are a few truly dreadful holiday songs that get stuck in my head if I hear them. I won’t say the whole thing out loud for fear of reactivating for me or for you–but hint, Mommy and Santa Claus. And anything to do with those blasted chipmunks!
HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, isn't it so funny how this happens to all of us? Because: It’s a small world after all. AHHHHHHHH why did I type that?
Once I started singing Super Trouper in the car when Jonathan was driving me to the airport for book tour, but I don;t know all the words, so I would just sing the first two lines, over and over, and finally Jonathan said: honey, do you know the REST of the song? Which I did not.
Don't get me started on Kars for Kids. (Which I think I read somewhere, was composed specifically to stick in your head.)
And, news you can use, I also heard that if you have an immovable earworm, start singing Jingle Bell Rock, and that will erase it.
JENN McKINLAY: LOL. I’ll get you for that ear worm, Hank! Like Julia, I sing all the time without realizing it. Hub does, however, and frequently suggests I change up my top 40 hits, which inexplicably include Bobby McGee, Shake It Off, and Here Comes the Sun. No idea why.
RHYS BOWEN: I think I’m the queen of the earworms. I hum all the time when I’m concentrating on something (but not when I’m writing). Since I sing in a church choir it’s often one of the hymns we are practicing that’s stuck in my head. If not I find that what I’m humming/singing has to do with what I’ve been talking or thinking about. Disputing some statement in the news? I find myself singing “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”
But the writer of Kars for Kids should be hung, drawn and quartered. Ditto the writer of It’s a Small World.
HALLIE EPHRON: Ear worms R us, too. For the longest time the theme for Masterpiece Theatre was stuck in my head. In competition with Shake It Off. And, of course, I am constantly Defying Gravity… quite inspirational.
It’s so nice to be able to “watch” TV these days and mute the commercials. Katy bar the door.
