Earworms

Stephen King, the legendary horror auteur, has a recurring column in Entertainment Weekly, and he's gotten on the songs-in-my-head bandwagon. In a recent column, he laments what he calls earworms and claims, among other things, that ABBA seems to be the band responsible for the most infectious songs in our collective heads.

But now that my attention has been drawn to this "earworm" concept, I feel so terribly behind the times. There's even a Wikipedia page about it. This phenomenon is also referred to as the "cognitive itch" which was coined by James Kellaris of the University of Cincinnati in his 2001 consumer psychology study on tunes that won't get out of our heads.

I knew I wasn't the first one to come up with this concept of logging the random songs lodged in the brain. When I started this project, I found a handful of other bloggers who have made some similar efforts. There's an excellent blog still active that's been up since 2006, written by New York journalist Holly Hughes. You can keep up with her mental soundtrack at The Song in My Head Today. She's a great writer, and draws from her love of influential artists like Big Star and Nick Lowe, but appreciates smooth cheese like Hall & Oates, which of course endears me to her even more.

The annals of earworm blogs unfortunately are also filled with the corpses of blogs gone by. Of note there was
brianssongs.blogspot.com which was updated during 2007-2008. I like the author's critical style and tastes. There was also mentaljukebox.blogspot.com which picked themes and then blogged about the songs that fit into the themes - good popculty fun, published in 2006. There are also plenty of other one-off entries about songs-stuck-in-various-heads within blogs that cover other subject matter as well. I will do my best to keep up the project and therefore keep forcing my arbitrary musical mind-bugs into your skulls for as long as humanly possible. Thanks for reading!

Here are some related earworm articles:

Top 10 Songs in Your Head
BBC article on the Kellaris study
Interview with Daniel Levitin of McGill University

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Earworm drawing by Smynx user JamesD
Song Stuck in my Head image by Sam Brown at explodingdog.com