Current Earworm

Chris Butler, The Devil Glitch

2026-04-24T00:00:00Z

Chris Butler, The Devil Glitch

Because I like you, this is the short version, only five minutes long, not the full version, which goes for almost 70 minutes. And yes, I did listen to the long version tonight. Listen to this and you too will be making up verses in your head for the next couple of days, any of which could plausibly be in the song. If I recall correctly, Chris Butler had a contest when this came out that asked people to send in prospective verses, so there's probably a version of this song that runs for days. But hey, the guy wrote Christmas Wrapping; he can whatever the fuck he wants for the rest of his life, and he chose this. Respect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3srW3DDHchI

Sir Douglas Quintet, She's About A Mover

2026-03-23T00:00:00Z

Sir Douglas Quintet, She's About A Mover

The organ in this song, a Vox, is amazing. The man behind it, Augie Myers, died, and since I read it that hook has been banging about in my head. R.I.P. Augie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKuj-QWjkpk

Edwin Starr, War

2026-02-28T00:00:00Z

Edwin Starr, War

Seems like a good song to be running through my head on a morning where the Orange Menace in the White House just started a war with Iran. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01-2pNCZiNk

Amy Rigby, Hell-Oh Sixty

2026-02-04T00:00:00Z

Amy Rigby, Hell-Oh Sixty

We saw Amy Rigby in New Orleans last week in an art gallery that was in a shotgun shack with about 25 people, and it was awesome. Everyone should get to see one of their favorite musicians in a setting like that. It was a combination music performance and reading from her new autobiography, Girl To Country (which covers stuff that happened after the events in her first autobiography, Girl To City). She opened the show with this song from her 2024 album Hang In There With Me. It's a song I loved from the first time I heard it, and it's been stuck in my brain ever since we saw her. As someone in his early sixties, it really resonated with me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PicmkxpzsC0

Darwin Deez, The Bomb Song

2026-01-26T00:00:00Z

Darwin Deez, The Bomb Song

I shot a roll of Lomography Lomochrome Turquoise in my Leica R4, which is a false color film that turns the blue sky orange. The shots looked apocalyptic. And they brought this song to mind. I mean, the sky is green in the song instead of orange, but you get the idea. It's been in and our of my ear ever since. It's a catchy little tune about unrequited love in the wake of nuclear war. It seems to fit the times. Sadly, he didn't do a video for this one. He did for several of the other tunes on this album; check out Radar Detector and Constellations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHKyTlDcutw

Oscar the Grouch, B Sandwich

2026-01-12T00:00:00Z

Oscar the Grouch, B Sandwich

Laura and I were working on adding fairy lights to a part of her outfit for Mardi Gras when this song from my childhood came unbidden into my brain. I was a little old for Sesame Street, but my brother was the right age, so we had a bunch of albums, including Oscar the Grouch's "Let A Frown Be Your Umbrella", which included this brief classic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFq4lgqIWnM

Timmy Thomas, Why Can't We Live Together

2025-11-12T00:00:00Z

Timmy Thomas, Why Can't We Live Together

No matter, no matter what color, you are still my brother. An admirable sentiment from 1972, and one we would do well to adopt today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ38KmkQPik

Johnny Cash, Folsom Prison Blues

2025-11-12T00:00:00Z

Johnny Cash, Folsom Prison Blues

The writer Sarah Kendzior got suspended from Bluesky for quoting the lyrics from Folsom Prison Blues in response to a bad take by the Wall Street Journal on Johnny Cash, and now I can't get this song out of my mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeZRYhLDLeU

Robyn Hitchcock, Devil's Radio

2025-11-11T00:00:00Z

Robyn Hitchcock, Devil's Radio

I saw something go whizzing by on social media about Ross Douthat, the village idiot at the New York Times, claiming that liberals were to blame for the groypers, the online storm troopers of the neo neo Nazi movement that has taken over America. Um, yeah, no. I think decades of a constant onslaught of hatred on media might have more to do with that. Which made me think of this song by Robyn Hitchcock, which has the immortal couplet "Kate said, the flowers of intolerance and hatred are blooming kind of early this year. Someone's been watering them...." And that someone is the Devil's Radio. Rush Limbaugh gets a callout in the song because it was written like 20 years ago and he wasn't dead yet, but there's a lot more than him out there filling the public airwaves with the message to hate your fellow man.

This is the version from Jonathan Demme's lesser-known concert film, Storefront Hitchcock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJpsKaMi6aE

Sleaford Mods, Tweet Tweet Tweet

2025-10-14T00:00:00Z

Sleaford Mods, Tweet Tweet Tweet

Spent the evening reading Mark Bray's history of Antifa. I kept thinking of the line from Tweet Tweet Tweet "UKIP and your disgrace", so my earworm tonight is just that, Sleaford Mods with Tweet Tweet Tweet. I think these guys are amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHMqEsXp96M

Talking Heads, Heaven

2025-10-06T00:00:00Z

Talking Heads, Heaven

This morning’s earworm is Heaven, by Talking Heads. Specifically the version from Stop Making Sense, the best concert film ever. This song just seems to get better as I get older for some reason. And the stripped down version from the film is the best version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuSsCRUXGOU

Krista L. L. Muir, Drugging the Drain

2025-10-04T00:00:00Z

Krista L. L. Muir, Drugging the Drain

This song by the woman behind the legendary Lederhosen Lucil is catchy as hell. Laura and I will often sing this to each other in the car, which we did yesterday, which is why it's stuck in my brain this morning. Who would have thought that a song about pouring prescription meds down the drain could be so inspiring?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JDuJVNYxgY

3 Mustaphas 3, Perfidia

2025-09-12T00:00:00Z

3 Mustaphas 3, Perfidia

I was talking to my wife Laura tonight, and she mentioned that in my absence, she's been leaving the TV on for her father when she goes to work set to a music channel. When she was home at lunch today, as he was eating in the kitchen, he recognized the song "Perfidia" playing on the music channel. There are about a thousand versions of Perfidia out there, and I occasionally trawl Apple Music to listen to as many in a row as I can, but the first version I heard and the one that I couldn't get out of my head after talking to my wife tonight was this version by Szegerely's finest export, 3 Mustaphas 3, sung in inimitable style by Uncle Patrel Mustapha.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmn-k2_c3fc

Magazine, A Song From Under the Floorboards

2025-08-24T00:00:00Z

Magazine, A Song From Under the Floorboards

I occasionally trawl Apple Music for bands I used to listen to in the dim and distant past (unlike those times when I trawl Apple Music looking for new music I haven't heard yet). Last week, I was listening to Magazine, Howard DeVoto's post-Buzzcocks band. I got stuck on the absurdist classic "A Song From Under The Floorboards".

This weekend, Laura and I went up to Catskill, New York, to attend Dromfest, a tiny scale rock festival where the guy who puts it on invites a bunch of his favorite indie rock bands from the 1980s and 1990s to come play to a couple hundred people in a dive bar just off the main drag in this tiny town upstate. One of the bands that played this year is one of my all time favorites (and probably the one that convinced us to attend), Scrawl, the riot grrrl precursor band that sprung out of Columbus, Ohio, back in the late 1980s. I've seen them probably a couple of dozen times. They're awesome. When they played Dromfest this year, they included a cover in their set. Marcy Mays, one of the two people who are indispensible to Scrawl, introduced it by saying that were going to do a cover, but didn't say what it was. Then the first words came out of her mouth as she sang the song: "I am angry, I am ill and I'm as ugly as sin". My jaw dropped. I had listened to the original probably 15 times the week before.

Here's the original. I'll see if I can find a video of Scrawl doing it; they were incredible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kewkTjNfUfk

Log, Measure Once, Cut Twice

2025-08-24T00:00:00Z

Log, Measure Once, Cut Twice

Very few people who follow me on social media will know this song, and most of the ones who do played on it. Laura mentioned this song to me in the course of conversation this evening and now it's stuck in my mind. A classic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXx_XnbKPU8

The Clash, Wrong 'Em Boyo

2025-08-18T00:00:00Z

The Clash, Wrong 'Em Boyo

My wife Laura uses playlists on Apple Music to set up lists of versions of the same song, which she'll then listen to for hours. She was showing them to me the other day when it occurred to her that she didn't have one for Stagger Lee. So she set one up, which led to us talking about the Clash's cover of Wrong 'Em Boyo, which incorporates Stagger Lee into it. 99 times out of 100, if there's a ska original and then a cover, I'll prefer the original. But in this case, the Clash did the number such justice that it can't be denied. And so it's been my earworm this morning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m463sDOYxPY

Soft Boys, Mr. Kennedy

2025-08-10T00:00:00Z

Soft Boys, Mr. Kennedy

The Soft Boys were like the Velvet Underground. They only sold a thousand copies of their classic record, but every person who bought one started a band. Acolytes like R.E.M. went on to fame and fortune and spoke glowingly of their influence. In 2002, they did what I hate and got back together (bands should never get back together, except for Wire, who actually made great music after reuniting). They put out a new album. I got it. I never listen to it. But this, this one song from the album, sticks with me, and it's what's plaguing me this Sunday morning in New Jersey. It's even one of that worst of subgenres of rock songs, the tour diary. No matter, it works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr9kn6YwogA

100 Flowers, Strip Club

2025-08-07T00:00:00Z

100 Flowers, Strip Club

Yesterday, I was listening to the recent odds and sods compilation of World of Pooh, and one of the songs sounded familiar. Wait a minute, I know this song. Took me a minute, but I realized it was a cover of a song by 100 Flowers, the punkish band that The Urinals evolved into. Hearing Barbara Manning sing it was an interesting genderfuck moment. But it's the orignal that's been stuck in my brain ever since.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWVa5xZ615A

Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, Black Hole Sun

2025-08-05T00:00:00Z

Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, Black Hole Sun

So we were discussing the difference between new Polaroid film and Fuji Instax, and one of the reasons I prefer Polaroid is the way specular highlights fail so abysmally on Instax. They show up black. If you ever have the sun in one of your shots, it will show up as a black hole in your picture. Which of course, brought this to mind, and is now my current earworm. The original, of course, was by Soundgarden, but this cover blows me away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgGBB0hTqo0

Courtney Barnett, Avant Gardener

2025-08-03T00:00:00Z

Courtney Barnett, Avant Gardener

Feel like I'm emphaseming.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcnIhzaDTd0