Eyeworm

An "earworm" is a song that gets caught on your head and won't go away. For instance, recently I've found the song "Spirits" by The Strumbellas going through my head. That song has the chorus,

I got guns in my head and they won't go
Spirits in my head and they won't go

Of course, that's pretty ironic to have the song in my head and it won't go. I start to wish I also had spirits with guns in there, they might scare the song out.

Well, recently I was listening to Internet radio on my phone. This particular radio app gives the name of the song on the phone's notifications, which is convenient because you can check the name of the song or artist without going to the app itself. Unfortunately, there's a bug: if you close the app, sometimes the name of the song currently playing stays in the notifications list, even though the song is long gone, and the app is closed.

When this happens, there doesn't seem to be any way to remove the song name, short of restarting the phone. So for the next few days, whenever I check messages, texts, or e-mails, somewhere in the list, I see "Hozier - Take Me To Church." That's a pretty earwormy song, and I find that just reading the name makes it go through my head.

But when a song sticks in your head after you've heard it, you can replay that fresh and accurate memory to yourself. When it's triggered by something else, you're singing the song based on faded memories. I find myself with fragments of the song that bleed into other tunes, and suddenly I have three different songs in my head, and they're all out of tune, with the wrong lyrics.  To defeat it, I have to listen to some other music, so I start up the radio app and begin the cycle all over again.