Who Moved My Cheese Metal?

This is so much more than an earworm:

Left Banke’s second-biggest hit — after, of course, “Walk Away Renee” — is also one of the loveliest songs of the late ’60s. Beautiful melody, and Steve Martin’s vocal, with measured and elegant falsetto, is a short course in how to convey complex mixed emotions in a simple pop song.

And a listen to “Pretty Ballerina” also, of course, virtually guarantees that one will spend at least a few hours quietly singing, “Was I surprised? No, not at all” to oneself. Nothing so bad about that.

A quickie. This has been stuck in my head for two days, so I might as well share:

Is there a single line that better defines Styx’s brand of pretentious prog pop than “Set an open course for the virgin sea”?

But Dennis DeYoung, though there’s a bit of a nasality thing going on there, was a fine singer in his prime.

A Sunday afternoon Earworm!

If you were born later than 1984 you more than likely never heard of these guys. That’s a shame as for many years they were outselling little known people like David Bowie in their native England.

In the early days of MTV you would hear this really upbeat and catchy song called “Run Run Away” by Slade.

From their 1983 album, The Amazing Kamikaze Syndrome, this is just some good dumb fun. I always get a kick out of this song with its guitar/bagpipe sound, the silly outfits and the overall enthusiasm of singing about nothing really. “All things to everyone” Sounds good to me.

Earworm! For a Friday, the first in an occasional series of classic songs that seem to have particular sticking power:

Click above to spend the rest of the day singing, “If you want it, here it is, come and get it.” In fact, this one is so catchy, you may not even need to click to start your brain singing. (If you don’t like the song, sorry about that — but who doesn’t like this song?)

What makes a song especially prone to earworm-iness anyway?