New Mystery Song!

Hello, readers!

Mystery songs are always fun entries, 'cause you get to play along at home! Here's a tune that has been in my head on a regular basis for years; I have no idea what it is. My best guess (though this could be way off!) is that it infiltrated my brain waves at some point when I was in college or just after, so perhaps between 14 and 18 years ago. Because of that timing, or perhaps due to some other idiosyncratic memory association with the tune, I've long thought it may be a traditional instrumental that was repurposed by either Camper Van Beethoven or They Might Be Giants. I happen to know a founding member of Camper Van,* and whistled it for him recently. He assured me it wasn't one of their tunes. (Please do check out Chris Molla's excellent blog, by the way! It's full of fascinating discussions of music, composition, performance art, and politics and culture.)


So, if any of you out there wanna wager a guess about the origin of this song, please do! I'm so curious about it, as it is an integral part of my mental soundscape, and I whistle it, unconsciously or quite consciously, multiple times a week.

*This statement reminds me of the scene I am very fond of in Annie Hall in which the guy behind Alvie (Woody Allen) in line at the movies name-drops Marshall McLuhan, and then Alvie pulls McLuhan out of the wings to support his assertion that the guy is a pretentious nitwit. Does name-dropping Chris Molla now make me a pretentious nitwit, I wonder?

**NEWSFLASH** The mystery has been solved! Four years after posting this entry, I finally figured out how this song came into my consciousness. Check out my update right here!

I Say A Little Prayer

Gave myself a fright waking up with this song this morning, and quickly looked for any new news of Aretha Franklin's pancreatic cancer. I don't exactly think that I have psychic abilities, but it's hard to explain how any of us can tap into the cultural zeitgeist at any moment. I hoped beyond hope that my earworm hadn't portended a turn south for Aretha's condition.

A quick web search yielded results that she's now denying that she had cancer and that the health problem is resolved. I'll say a little prayer for her anyway.

Artist: Aretha Franklin
Year: 1968
Rating: Luke Hot

Note: I wasn't sure at first whether it was Dionne Warwick's original that matched my mental image of the song, or if it was Aretha's. My first impulse was that it was Aretha's, and that's indeed what it turned out to be. Unless you've studied the neuropsychology of music and memory, or unless you're an earworm nerd like me, you might be suspicious about the idea that I had any one particular version of a song in my head, but this phenomenon is very real. Check out the McGill University Laboratory for Music, Perception, Cognition, and Expertise.

For No One

Really sweet footage of Paul McCartney in the studio for the 1984 Give My Regards to Broad Street soundtrack, on which he re-released the song.

Artist: Beatles
Year: 1966 (original release)
Rating: Hot!


Note 1: This song came into my head a long time ago, before all the box set/Rock Band hype; I've got a backlog in my song queue right now. Trying to catch up!
Note 2: Read Chuck Klosterman's hilarious review of the box set.

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

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