...I now have an earworm of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da."

Your turn.

(Yeah, the first two lines are missing. I would imagine timing is everything on a song like this.)

As the subject line indicates, one side effect of all this reading I've been doing about the Grateful Dead is... oh boy, am I having earworms. It's not so bad when it's "Friend Of the Devil" or "Casey Jones," but I was just scanning a document for the conference we're working on and it was only when the student at the next computer over looked at me funny that I realized I was sort of humming "Truckin'" under my breath. And I really don't know "Truckin'."

Dammit, get out of my head, you hippies!

...this morning, it was The Kinks on Q-104. And I'm here to tell you, "Lola" is one damned persistent earworm.

I may not be able to lay this entirely on The Kinks, though, because theirs is not the version that's playing in my head. Which probably means that if you-know-who ever start playing you-know-what on Tuesday nights, I am just going to have to kill myself.

Just so you know, latsyrk and elle_03, "Lola" is just as persistent an earworm as...

...well, this:



Heh. You're welcome.

ETA: And now, of course, I have just swapped earworms...

Being prone to earworms (not necessarily annoying ones, at least not for the first couple of days) I am interested in how people deal with them. I'm especially wondering what you do if, like me, you get earworms of the one little piece of a song you happen to know and it lays overandoverandover.

You know, like "Driving that train/High on cocaine/Casey Jones you better watch your speed" (and thank you latsyrk for the additional lyrics!)

This happened to me after I saw Master and Commander for the first time: I got an earworm of the song in the officers' mess. In that case, however, I knew so many similar folk songs that my brain just filled in perfectly reasonable words until I had two complete, original verses of the song and honestly thought they were real. I believe they call this "the oral tradition."

Most of the time this does not happen. So, what does one do?

Poll #888744 Earworm Poll
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

When I have an earworm of a song I don't really know, I:

Don't you hate it when you get an earworm of a song you don't really know? Right now the lines "driving that train, high on cocaine/Casey Jones you better something something something..." ("move it along"?) keep repeating themselves in my mind. Not that I'm blaming anybody, but it's almost as bad as the time I got a line and a half from "Cocaine Cowgirl" in my head that kept trying to turn into "Cowgirl In the Sand," which I didn't really know at the time either.

The solution in that case was to get the CD and learn "Cocaine Cowgirl" in its entirety--and I think we all know how that turned out.

I foresee Grateful Dead records in my immediate future. I'm just sayin'.

Like an idiot I went over to Buckcherry's MySpace page a minute ago, and now I have the unexpurgated version of "Crazy Bitch" stuck in my head. Eight AM is just too early to be that trashy so I think I had better listen to something else real quick before I actually start singing it. As it happens, I think the only lines I know the lyrics to are the really dirty ones. (Yeah, ain't that the way.)

Now, what song to use to overwrite the earworm? I think April Wine has a catchy one about the moon...

Here's a link to the Guthries page at New Music Canada, which includes several of their songs (including some from the second CD.) Scroll down a piece and there's "Patsy Cline." Now, listen to that and tell me you don't have an earworm. Or at least a strong desire to learn to play the banjo.

No, not Patsy herself. The Guthries' song "Patsy Cline." It makes for a dandy little earworm, I must say. The guy in the song is all heartbroke and mopey and saying "Patsy Cline is the only one who could understand how I'm feeling tonight..."

Accompanied by ridiculously cheerful banjos. Hee.

Unlike the guy in "Better Part Of An Hour," you get the distinct impression the banjo-playing kid is going to get over it, although one of his friends may give him a really hard shaking in the near future. Or, you know, he'll just fall madly in love with somebody else. If he runs into any cute and sympathetic female bartenders in the next few days, I'd say the chances are good he'll make an excellent recovery.

Last week on American Idol I was both amused and horrified when Barry Manilow proclaimed his own ignorance of the song "Walking After Midnight" by Patsy. "I'm from Brooklyn," quoth Barry. Yeah. And Matt Mays is from Dartmouth. And they say kids today know nothing about music.

After hearing this tune I suddenly understand the bewildered articles I read online, from the early days of El Torpedo, when the journalists essentially wailed, "Who is this noisy young man and what has he done with Matt Mays???" Okay, lyrically, it's definitely the same guy only a little older. But I can see where the distorted guitars and heavy decibel load might have been a shock to the system after... banjos.

Okay, and trust me when I tell you, I am so looking forward to those same distorted guitars in about four hours' time!

Davey and me, face-down in our soup
In some French restaurant outside Riviere-Du-Loup
Last night of the tour we burned the place to the ground
There's a reason why I love this town...

Yeah, it's Joel again. Still no urge to stick a pencil in my ear. The funny thing is, the CD in my player is Down At the Khyber, which is not the CD on which this earworm appears.

Am I still alive? Where did I collapse?
In Edmonton, Alberta, or home in Halifax?
Float me down the river to the Musquodoboit Harbour
Because I’m getting nowhere...

When the Emergency opened for the Hip last year, this was the song that ended with Joel leading the audience in a spell-along chant of "Musquodoboit." This is what happens when a long tour ends up back home--the opening act suddenly finds that everyone in the audience gets all the inside references in his songs.