Sometimes, I get “hooked” by a song. I can feel it happening, almost like a switch being flipped. Thirty seconds is usually all it takes—one verse, one chorus—and suddenly, I’m caught. From that moment on, the song is no longer “out there” on the radio or in the room with me. It’s inside, looping on repeat.
If there’s no thought filling the space, chances are the song is playing. When I wake in the middle of the night to pee, it’s playing. When I wake in the morning, it’s playing. Right now, as I write these words, it’s playing. My baseline quiet—the still backdrop I usually live against—is replaced by this one piece of music until it has fully burned itself out. Sometimes this takes a week or more. 😬
I’ve found that things go more smoothly if I learn the lyrics. Singing along, without stumbling or fumbling the words, seems to give the earworm a little more room to stretch out and settle in. So I listen obsessively, on repeat, until I know it well enough to sing it on my own. Since I got hooked a few days ago, I’ve listened to the song maybe seventy or eighty times. My sweet son (bless him!), endured a continuous loop of it in the car yesterday without protest. He's got the chorus down pretty well now!
Golly, did this earworming situation used to bother me! I wanted silence back. I wanted the song to stop hijacking my inner space. But somewhere along the way, my relationship to it softened. Now I just let the song do what it does. It comes in, it takes up residence, and eventually it moves on. I try not to resist, and I try not to make everyone else around me miserable in the meantime. 👂🪱😂
It’s such an interesting phenomenon—how something as ordinary as a tune can weave itself into awareness and hum along in the background of everything else. I don’t invite it, and I don’t choose it. It just arrives, stays for as long as it stays, and eventually fades on its own. Earworms, thoughts, moods—they come and go in their own rhythm. And maybe that’s the reminder: none of it needs managing. I simply do what occurs to me to do in the moment.
And if you're curious about the song that got me this time, here it is:
It is not lost on me that I wrote a whole post on the Benson Boone song Beautiful Things. My brain wants to tell you that I don't really like Benson Boone... or more accurately, that I'm too old to like Benson Boone. But that's obviously not the case! And who cares anyway?!
Oh, and sorry not sorry if this song worms its way into your head! We can sing it together!