About five years ago I made a mental decision to document all of the songs that get stuck in my head. This might be hard for some people to understand, but when I get something in my head, it usually takes a couple of days for it to wash out, and there’s no telling how it’s going to get in there in the first place: it could be playing on the loudspeaker at the grocery store, it could be used in an Instagram reel, or it could be something that just pops in there. I was curious the other day and decided to make a list of all of the earworm songs I’ve made note of on this site, which was a lot more than I thought it was, 88 in total to date. There are only a few I’m embarrassed by, but typically I’m not in charge of these things.
- Never Enough, The Cure
- Wire, U2
- Regret, New Order
- World (Price of Love), New Order
- Angel, Massive Attack
- Geek Stink Breath, Green Day
- Heavy Metal Suicide, Ringo Deathstarr
- Iris, Goo Goo Dolls
- Fu Manchu, Mongoose
- She Drives Me Crazy, Fine Young Cannibals
- Falling Hard, Crystal Method
- Ladytron, Destroy Everything You Touch
- Dark Neccessities, Red Hot Chili Peppers
- Lights Out, Royal Blood
- Phantogram’s Howling at the Moon
- I’d Really Love to See You Tonight, England Dan & John Ford Coley
- Auto Pilot, Queens of the Stone Age
- Hands All Over, Soundgarden
- Outshined, Soundgarden
- Burden In My Hand, Soundgarden,
- Something’s Always Wrong, Toad the Wet Sprocket
- Light Design, Turnstile
- Never Enough, Turnstile
- Wires, Red Fang
- Blue Light, David Gilmour
- True Widow, Theurgist
- Dreams, Beck
- Daymom, Drop Nineteens
- You Can’t Quit Me Baby, Queens of the Stone Age
- Pull Me Under, Dream Theater
- Apocalypse, Cigarettes After Sex
- A View to a Kill, Duran Duran
- Love Spreads, The Stone Roses
- Then She Did…, Jane’s Addiction
- How to Handle a Rope, Queens of the Stone Age
- Young Americans, David Bowie
- Tristessa, Smashing Pumpkins
- Mexican Moon, Concrete Blonde
- Eurotrash Girl, Cracker
- Spring and Summer, Fall, Blonde Redhead
- Atlas, Battles
- Armageddon It, Def Leppard
- ill peach, BLOOM
- This Conversation is Getting Boring, Acopia
- Beautiful Disaster, 311
- Inertia Creeps, Massive Attack
- My People, The Beaches
- Dirty Movies, Van Halen
- Cemeteries of London, Coldplay
- Council Skies, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds
- She Sells Sanctuary, The Cult
- Afterlife, Arcade Fire
- Welcome to the Pleasuredome, Frankie Goes to Hollywood
- Valerie Loves Me, Material Issue
- World Impact, Drug Church
- Sometimes, My Bloody Valentine
- Need You Tonight, INXS
- Golden Brown, The Stranglers
- No Time To Die, Billie Eilish
- Ocean Size, Jane’s Addiction
- Giant Peach, Wolf Alice
- Brushed, Quicksand
- Nothing to See, Miya Folick
- Maria También, Khruangbin
- Fight Test, The Flaming Lips
- SWEET75, Sleigh Bells
- Shotgun, Soccer Mommy
- New York, Richard Ashcroft
- My Own Worst Enemy, Lit
- Lies, Chvrches
- Glamour Profession, Steely Dan
- Guilt, Ringo Deathstarr
- Around the World, Daft Punk
- Music Sounds Better With You, Stardust
- Japan, Tycho
- Don’t Waste My Time, Sault
- Cosmonauts, Quicksand
- Valerie Loves Me, Material Issue
- Two Urns, Windhand
- Party in the USA, Miley Cyrus
- Falling Hard, The Crystal Method
- Sometimes, My Bloody Valentine
- Cure for Pain, Morphine
- You Made It, DJ Shadow
- Here’s What’s left, RJD2
- Saturdays, Cut Copy
- Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime, Beck
- One Too Many Mornings, Chemical Brothers
This is Never Enough, by The Cure. This appeared on a comp album they put out called Mixed Up, where they had a bunch of different artists re-imagine earlier work, and was an extended version of a new single. My roommate bought the album and I had this one track on heavy repeat back in the day. All of the current streaming versions are different than the one I remember—the one on the cassette was a little shorter and simpler, and I like that one best.
Listening to a podcast this weekend, I heard a mention of Wire by U2 featured in a first-season episode of Miami Vice scoring a nighttime car chase, and the host said that it was the most 1985 thing he’d ever heard or seen. I would agree. I have long loved this song, my favorite off an album full of fantastic tracks, and it appears on every driving playlist I’ve ever assembled—at the risk of inspiring a speeding ticket. Now I’m binging the first season of the series (available on Tubi) and it is totally taking me back to middle school.
Apparently they don’t play it much live, which is a crime; this is a clip from a 1985 performance during the Unforgettable Fire tour.
I heard Regret by New Order at the pharmacy earlier this week and haven’t been able to shake it. Back in the day I had no idea this was the same band that released Blue Monday or had any connection to Joy Division; they were completely off my radar until I was in college. (Remember, I was raised in the State of Classic Rock, in the county of Hair Metal). This song features Peter Hook’s bass melody prominently, which is As Things Should Be, but another great song off this album is World (Price of Love), where he’s conspicuously absent.
Related: one of the books on my library list is Shadowplayers: the Rise and Fall of Factory Records, which chronicles the birth and death of their music label—and the Manchester club they essentially underwrote.
Reading multiple stories about how AI demand has made hard drive, GPU and RAM prices all skyrocket, I decided to pull the trigger and upgrade my laptop to something that will handle video editing better than the one I’ve currently got. This is an M2 Macbook Air that I bought three years ago, and I made the mistake of only speccing 8GB of RAM. It’s been a solid machine, but it has a few quirks I dislike (mainly software-related) and it just chugs when I’m working with heavy video files. I specced out a new M5 Air with 16GB of RAM last week, and with a trade in on my current machine I should save about 1/3 of the total cost. However, the order is currently stuck in processing—what was supposed to be in stock locally is now estimated to be here between May 15-19.
Interestingly, when I look at the stats for IK here, my daily numbers have jumped up to about four times where they used to be a year ago, and when I compare that with the Scout journal, those numbers have dropped. My guess (and I need to do a lot more digging in my server logs) is that I’m getting hit by the AI bots, who are scraping the site for content. I would have expected that the Scout journal would be hit just as much, but apparently not.
I’ve had the drumbeat and bassline of Angel by Massive Attack stuck in my head for the last three days. I was fortunate enough to see them live in 2019 during the Mezzanine 30th Anniversary tour, and this was more powerful in person than the recorded version, if that’s possible. Being able to see Horace Andy and Liz Fraser sing their tracks live was incredible.
I’ve had a number of different songs buzzing around my skull over the last couple of weeks, but this one flew in and stuck itself directly into my cerebral cortex.
Back In The Day, one of the first of a handful of MP3s I yoinked from Napster was a copy of this song. It still rips.
Heavy Metal Suicide, by the humorously named Ringo Deathstarr. Their music spans several genres, from shoegaze to throwback alternative metal—this track being a good example of the latter. Their albums have been hit or miss for me, but each one has contained at least two or three good tracks, making for a good back catalog. See also: Guilt, Stare at the Sun, and Two Girls.
Apparently The Kids have found a couple of classic rock songs to replace the guitar freakout in Free Bird to accompany their Insta reels: I’ve heard Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls repeatedly to describe Gen-X related topics they have no firsthand experience with. Now it’s stuck in my head. I didn’t like this band when they were big, and I was sick of this song when it was popular. Goddamn it. [Cues up a Spotify playlist to wash the dirt out of my ears]
This week’s brainpan echo: Fu Manchu, Mongoose. I have a deep love for stoner rock: bluesy, distorted, repeating riffs with nonsense lyrics and a driving beat. Fu Manchu has been around for decades and brings the thunder on this track; their killer-to-filler ratio is much less than a QOTSA or Clutch, but when it works, it works.
She Drives Me Crazy, by the Fine Young Cannibals. This song has taken up residence in my brain after I listened to a podcast about the quick life and death of this band, who made two albums and split up in the late 80’s. I wasn’t a huge fan back in the day but now I have more respect for the production and craft, and it’s catchy as hell. Bonus trivia: the guitarist and bassist were both from The English Beat, another favorite band of mine from the early 80’s.