My wife blogged today about those annoying little jingles or songs that get stuck in your head, and it got me to thinking.... it's not getting individual tunes stuck in my head that bugs me so much as the fact that I have this constant soundtrack playing in my head.  You see, at the risk of oversharing, I have a somewhat unhealthy obsession with song lyrics.  I think it all started when I was a teenager, buying albums (yes, alas, I grew up in the analog music era) and devouring the lyrics on the record jacket as I listened to the songs.  Thinking back, I'm not sure why I did this, but it just sort of appealed to me to memorize that kind of stuff.  Look at me talking in the past tense, like I'm totally cured or something.  Truth be told, I still have this obsessive compulsive need to know the lyrics of songs I like, but now I have the web for instant gratification.

So, anyway, enough Freudian analysis.  Back to my point.  In addition to getting the occassional tune stuck in my head, I often have a hard time listening to people talk without connecting things they say to song lyrics and then getting that song stuck in my head.  For example, if we were hanging out and you said "I like beer," my mental jukebox would immediately cue up the Tom T. Hall classic ("I like beer / It makes me a jolly good fellow" ).  When someone suggests we lay it on the line, my brain launches into a rousing rendition of Triumph rockin' out ("Lay-ee it the line, girl!").  Talk to me about France's national motto and I don't think Charles Darnay or Jean Valjean, I think Adam and the Ants' Ant Rap ("Liberte, egalite, au jour d’hu i c’est tres tres tres / Voici l’opportunite nous incroyables").

Since I'm already oversharing, I should also mention that I don't mind singing along out loud when that soundtrack kicks off in my head.  More often than not, social convention prevents me from doing this, but sometimes I have to bite my bottom lip to keep it in.  After all, a business meeting is absolutely no place to bust out with a few lines of Snoop's Gin and Juice and the doctor's office is unlikely to appreciate my rendition of the Bee Gee's "Gimme that night fee-vuh,  night fee-vuuuuhh / We know how to do it!" It's actually not so much the social convention thing that prevents me from letting it fly; it's fear that whoever I'm with won't understand the connection.  That's always a bummer, as one hates to have to explain, "Um, well, you see, you said 'chance,' so naturally ABBA's Take a Chance on Me popped into my head, and I started singing.  Get it?" Even worse is when someone doesn't know the song or artist.  "Who's ABBA?" one of my 20-something friends might ask.  Ouch.

So now you know.  With me, it's not so much that one catchy tune is stuck in my head.  It's that all of them are.