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I knew that Fall Out Boy was here to stay when I woke up in Athens, thousands of miles from home, with the same line repeating in my head. The night before, my boyfriend had proposed to me in the hot tub of our rental apartment with a lovely opal ring. It was one of the happiest moments of my life, and we celebrated with breakfast on the terrace and an afternoon drive to the Temple of Poseidon. And yet, amid that joyousness, there it was, rolling between my ears like a loose marble: I’ve got the red carpet blues, baby.Â
Fellow emo babies may recognize that line from “It’s Hard to Say ‘I Do’ When I Don’t,†a forgettable Japanese bonus cut from 2007’s Infinity on High. It wasn’t close to my favorite Fall Out Boy song, much less one that I wanted following me everywhere I went. For nearly 14 years, it barely factored into my day-to-day life. Then, without warning, it became central to my day-to-day life. I spent years being driven to near derangement by a track I never really liked in the first place.
It was not unusual that I would have a song stuck in my head. My mind has always been prone to fixation: I was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder at 17, which left me with obsessions that prompted me to perform time-consuming rituals and tasks. Earworms were not uncommon for me, though they’d eventually get forced out by something else. “It’s Hard to Say†was different. It wouldn’t leave. By the time of my engagement, it had been wedged in my mind for months, a chorus joining me the second I got out of bed and popping back up as I went about my morning errands. After our trip to Greece, I’d hoped an unrelated move from London to Brighton would shake it free. But when I awoke on an air mattress 150 miles away, there it was, different lyrics but always the same track: Everyone shakes to the beat with a barrel down their throat. It followed me for the next two years, on trips around the world and during my normal daily routine, in a way that seemed like a taunt: My brain was taking the mechanical “now press repeat†directive at the end of the song a little too literally.
In the mornings, when the song would start looping, I thought about the Seinfeld episode where George has “Master of the House†stuck in his head and Jerry tells him about the composer Robert Schumann, who went insane due to a persistent A-note ringing in his ears. George naturally assumes “Master†could finally be the thing that does him in. Not wanting to end up like either Schumann or Costanza, I set out to find an explanation — and hopefully a cure.
Even after I managed to gain control over my clinical OCD in my early 20s, I assumed it was normal to have a song stuck in your head for months at a time. But the more I read about people complaining of having one rattling around for just a single day, the more I realized I was in the minority. Early in my research, I came across the term “stuck song syndrome,†which refers to when a track is persistent enough to be debilitating or disruptive. According to a paper in the National Library of Medicine, up to 98 percent of people have experienced an earworm, but only 30 percent of people like myself described it as “disturbing.†In other words, while recurring tunes that refuse to leave are common (it’s what pop music is supposed to do!), “stuck song syndrome†happens far less frequently. When a song does get stuck, it forms a cognitive itch, which basically means you aren’t satisfied unless you repeat it. The brain itches back, resulting in a loop. The more you try to suppress it, the worse it gets. This tracked to my experience. The closest nonscientific description I could find to what was happening to me came from the writer John Laughton, who once described having songs stuck in his head as “musical hallucinations.†In the end, Laughton went on SSRIs to control the associated anxiety.
I was determined to find relief, ideally without having to resort to medication — and in the process, I wanted to learn how the song got embedded in the first place. My first call was to Kelly Jakubowski, an associate professor in music psychology at Durham University who specializes in earworms. She told me that while having the same song in your head for years is extreme, it is common during times of extreme stress. External stimuli can set it off but so can internal states like our mood and biological rhythms.
“Waking is a common time to experience earworms, because it is a time of day when we’ve got a bit of spare cognitive resources for daydreaming and mind wandering, which earworms are a subcategory of,†she explained. That made sense to me, but it didn’t give me an idea of how to shake it. I wasn’t feeling extreme stress, so I could rule that out. And while I’ve mostly recovered from OCD, I can’t change the reality of my brain’s wiring any more than I can avoid waking up every day. When I asked Jakubowski how to get out of this mess, she pointed me to a paper she had published that outlined three strategies: ignoring the song and letting it go away, listening to other music to see if it takes its place, or intentionally listening to the song in full rather than trying to avoid it. I tried, and failed, at all of the above, before attempting Dr. Jakubowski’s other suggestion: chewing gum vigorously, in order to “tie up the articulatory muscles needed to mentally rehearse sounds.†It didn’t work and, fearing TMJ, I abandoned it.
Wondering if my predicament might relate to the song itself, I reached out to musicology professor and Vulture’s own Switched on Pop co-host Nate Sloan, hoping his insight could lead to a miracle. He first told me that while any song can outstay its welcome, there are some qualities that make one more earworm-ready. For one, tempo. “Faster songs tend to be more sticky than slower songs,†said Sloan. “It’s Hard to Say ‘I Do’ When I Don’t†fit the bill: It’s repetitive with a looping melody that never reaches closure. The BPM is fast, too: 164, along the lines of “High Hopes†by Panic! At the Disco.
Sloan also invoked phonological loops, which can force a song to linger longer than expected. In a phonological loop, you repeat something over and over again, which creates short-term memories. However, when you get music stuck in your head, the phonological loop breaks. “Rather than being used temporarily and discarded, the loop calcifies. It’s a neurological failure,†said Sloan. As a solution, he suggested I learn to perform “It’s Hard to Say ‘I Do’ When I Don’t,†which can make a song lose its power.
An absence of musical talent rendered that sort of performance by me a nonstarter, but it got me wondering whether musicians contend with earworms. If just listening to music can lead to these kinds of broken phonological loops, what is it like for people who spend every day writing and performing it? I asked my friend Will, frontman of glam-goth band Creeper, whether he ever gets his own songs stuck in his head when he’s working on them. The answer was no: “If anything, I could do with learning them more.†But he was not immune to others’ music. “It’s a different song every four months,†he said. “I once had the piano ending of ‘Layla’ by Derek and the Dominos stuck in my head for a full year.†Will was able to get rid of it eventually through hypnotherapy, which he’d once used to break a different cognitive pattern.
I was worried a hypnotherapist might glom onto the song’s theme of relationship dissatisfaction and the way it melded into my subconscious around the time I got engaged. But I was also out of options, so I reached out to hypnotherapist Sara Loiperdinger. On our first call, we tried to get to the bottom of whether there might be a more emotional reason for this particular loop, though that was a dead end. In a session a few days later, Sara guided me through relaxation techniques to drag my busy brain toward hypnagogia, a state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep — the same space I occupy when the song appears in the morning. I told Loiperdinger that, despite the use of noise-canceling headphones and her soothing voice, I was still affected by outside noises: buses, people chatting as they walked past, my neighbor playing the recorder for the fourth hour in a row.
That I couldn’t tune out these noises ended up guiding my session. We identified times when I was a toddler and first aware that I found the world overstimulating, like in a restaurant. I remembered that I would hide under the table or walk away, self-regulating my own sensory input, but that I would then be punished. So we created a scenario wherein someone steps in and allows me to find that same quiet. As a person whose brain is always full of thoughts — and neuroses, and images, and bits of songs, and plans, and fears — the morning is the only time it’s empty. Sara thought I might fill that space with the first thing that entered my head in a way of not being alone with that emptiness. For me, the only way to break that cycle is by finding a way to go easy on myself — to lead that small child, overwhelmed by a noisy world, away from the table. Maybe then I could wake up to silence.
My session with Loiperdinger didn’t completely shake the song out of my head, but she helped me feel I might be able to eventually find some quiet. Understanding that I have always been overwhelmed by the sounds both inside and outside of my head doesn’t help me to escape them, but it did help me have some empathy for myself. Every morning when I wake up with Patrick Stump wailing You’re appealing to emotions that I simply do not have, I get on with my day, hoping that there’ll be a pocket of quiet.
Loiperdinger also tapped into something that felt integral to the way I respond to aural stimuli. Like most teenagers in the mid-2000s, when new CDs came out, I would sit on the floor of my room listening to them over and over again. In 2007, Infinity on High’s release date was circled in my diary. I had big plans to be alone in my room, but I was 14 years old and had been kicked out of the house following an argument with my mom. I ended up staying with a friend for a few weeks, and following my return home, I never again found my childhood bedroom a safe place to simply be, let alone to listen to records on repeat. Maybe, despite my insistence to the contrary, unresolved trauma was to blame.
Then a couple of months after my sessions with Loiperdinger, something strange happened: I woke up and the song was gone. At the time, I was on vacation in Tokyo, where I was more stimulated than I’d ever been: animated billboards, Gachapon machines, Hello Kitty at every turn. I was having the time of my life, but I was constantly overwhelmed. Jakubowski had told me that waking was a time when we might be more susceptible to stuck songs because we were free of other stimuli. In Tokyo, that wasn’t true. I could see a giant figure of Godzilla from my window. Every day I walked ten miles, seeking every sensation I could, soaking up the sensory overload. There was no room in my brain for anything other than the jingle of a camera store I had walked into on the first day. It turns out that one way to clear songs from my mind is by bombarding myself with sensory inputs. Does that mean I’ll need to visit Tokyo every time this happens? That depends on the songs that get stuck.