Table of Contents
Prologue: Full of Sound and Fury (below and at 3QD)
Who Am I?: The Allman Brothers, “Win, Lose, or Draw”
I’m a Man: Bill Conti, “The Theme to Rocky”
Born Again: Fleetwood Mac, “Monday Morning”
Outta Sight: Leon Russell, “Delta Lady”
Your America: Redbone, “Come and Get Your Love”
Nowhere to Run: Bob Seger, “Night Moves”
Bartender Bookmarks: Thin Lizzy, “Rosalie”
The Other America: The Domino Kings, “Walk Away if You Want to”
Fame and Oblivion: Big Star, “My Life is Right”
Behold the Sheep: Al Stewart, “Year of the Cat”
The Virgin Hairs: The Association, “Never My Love”
What I Don’t Wanna Be: The Grateful Dead, “Touch of Grey”
Will This Never End?: The Outlaws, “Green Grass and High Tides Forever”
Finding Lemmy: Motörhead, “Ace of Spades”
What We Become: Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit”
Whom We’re Not: Prince, “Purple Rain”
Lost: Blind Faith, “Sea of Joy”
That Fleeting Moment: Screaming Trees, “I Nearly Lost You There”
I’m a Horrible Person: The Talking Heads, “Burning Down the House”
Am I a Man?: David Bowie, “Queen Bitch
Changes: Charles Bradley, “Changes”
Epilogue: Ghost Tracks
*
Prologue: Full of Sound and Fury
Last year we drove across the country. We had one cassette tape to listen to on the entire trip. I don’t remember what it was.
-Steven Wright
You sing it in the shower and in the car. You slap your thighs and lip sync at work. Eventually you try to ignore it, but on and on it goes. You often don’t remember when it began. Worst of all, you have no idea how to make it stop. Good, bad, or otherwise, the song has a hold on you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Then, poof! It’s gone.
You don’t know what you did. Probably nothing. Nor can you pinpoint a specific moment when the song slipped away, unnoticed. While it was here, there was no escaping it. But when you weren’t looking, it magically flittered away, like pixie dust losing its shimmer in the breeze; the spell has been broken and you are finally free.
I’m no different from other people, except when I am.
Left to its own devices, my mind will usually fill the blank spots with music. Walking down the street, cooking dinner, lazing around the house: most activities are accompanied by a random soundtrack. Even while doing something that requires substantial concentration, such as writing this book for example, I usually hear music in my head.
Simply put, music clings to me. All kinds, really. Any genre. Rock, blues, pop, folk, jazz, hip hop, classical, avante-garde, whatever. Things I like, things I don’t. A song I heard on the radio. The theme to a TV program. Something playing in the supermarket, or blaring out the window of someone else’s car, or honestly from lord knows where. Pieces of songs, scraps of this and that, melodies and chords, beats and rhythms parade through my brain, one after the next, a vast array of sound, ever changing . . .
Until a something gets stuck.
Some folks call it an “earworm.” I’ve never cared for that metaphor. Yes, it comes from without and burrows in. But to me, it never feels like some squirmy little thing writhing around my ear canal. When a song overtakes me, it fills up my entire being, from head to toe, as if I’m possessed by a musical ghost doomed to haunt me until some mysterious curse is lifted. And until then, this melodic specter and I are bound together, moving through each other effortlessly and seemingly endlessly.
Does it last a day? Sure. Two? Why not. Three or four? A bit exasperating, yet still manageable.
But there’s stuck, and there’s Stuck. A week or two or more? The same goddamn song in a closed circuit, circling round and round for half a month or longer?
That’s how I live.
Not always. Just now and again, I find myself trapped in a drawn out feedback loop.
It took me a while to realize that few folks, even those who love and listen to a lot of music, are periodically badgered by a single tune for weeks at a time. For most of my life, I just assumed that everyone went through that once in a while. But as best I can tell, most people only have to endure it for a day or two or three. I get those short bouts too. So often I don’t even notice. But two weeks? A month?
Maybe it’s some sort of “gift.” Or perhaps, as I suspect, I really am broken. Regardless, whether a prophet or a patient, by 2013 I was desperate for a coping mechanism, a way to deal with shit instead of merely enduring it. That year I made a decision: when one of these restless, musical apparitions wrapped itself around my soul, I would try to write about it.
But write what? The truth is, I had no interest in figuring out why this happens. I wanted to write for sweet relief, not tinker with mechanical questions about cause. I simply accept that it happens and always will; I’m untempted by fruitless quests for a mythical, preventative “cure.”
Rather, my goal was more esoteric. I wanted to know what it means.
What does it say about me? About all of us? What can it tell me about life? Is there a method to the melodic madness? Can I descry any truth amid the blur of this accursed carousel?
But the decision to write was also born of a fragile, selfish hope; that it might help exorcize the wraiths, or at least broker some form of reconciliation with the musical phantoms that stalk me. That I could learn to dance with ghosts.
I did not know what I would find, but assumed it would be more than I was looking for. That if I attempted to dislodge a song from my head, plenty of other things would probably tumble out with it. So I decided not to contrive or predetermine essay topics. I wanted to approach it organically, to be honest and open, to keep it simple and take it as it happens.
My pen would be guided by whatever themes bubbled up from the frenzy, full of sound and fury and signifying anything.
However, I also wanted to avoid an aimless, self-indulgent journey into endless entropy. For while everything emerges from chaos, the pandemonium periodically produces repetitive refrains. So to frame the free-flowing chaos, I set some basic parameters. Short term tenants, songs that hang out in my head for no more than a few days, are too pedestrian . Too corporal. Too wormy. I decided not to tussle with anything that latched onto me for less than two full weeks. But I would not avoid any that did. Do not shirk. T ake them as they come, let them lead the way, and keep an eye out for signposts and augurs amid the maelstrom.
What follows then are the actual demons, in the order they appeared. Twenty-one songs that, in intervals over a five year period, utterly dominated my life for the better part of a month or more. Among them, the oldest is from 1966, before I was born. The newest was recorded in 2016, after I’d already spent three years working on this project. Most of them are one form or another of rock n roll, loosely defined, from cheesy pop to hard rock. However, R&B, funk, and country also drop in.
I didn’t pick these songs because they already had some special meaning to me, or because they’re personal favorites, or because they reflect the full breadth of my musical interests, or because they’re good. I didn’t pick these songs at all. They picked me. I don’t even care for some of them. But all of them staked a claim to my consciousness and would not relent; I am merely looking for a way to fight back. Not against them, but against myself.
I have used these songs to crack myself open. Sometimes a given song has served as a sturdy lever and split me cleanly. Sometimes the pressure was too great and everything snapped, leaving both me and the song in broken pieces on the floor. And like an ancient priest, I stare at the scattered fragments, trying to divine some meaning, to translate the will of the sacred ancestors. But whether I’m offering up grave insights into the depths of my soul and human nature, or spouting meaningless gibberish couched in celestial trickery, I cannot say. All I know is that the effort to decipher the songs that get stuck in my head has led me on a strange voyage that has been at turns frustrating and a great relief.
I have written about the music. I have written about myself. I have written about all of us and this wobbly world of ours. I have set sail, leaving the mapped and the known behind me. I did not chart the path or pilot the ship. From time to time, the billowy gusts have 
simply taken it upon themselves to fill my sails and send me where they will. I have made no attempt to guide the rudder or to question how, when, or why the winds wail. What follows are the meanderings, grumblings, and tittle tattle of one man and his squawking albatrosses, alone with each other on a boat adrift in open waters, bouncing to the rhythm of the song.
Stuck appears every Monday through April, 2020 at 3 Quarks Daily.