The Incessant Personal Radio

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Every morning, when I open my eyes, it is like I am joining a radio program already in progress. A song I may or may not have heard recently is playing in my head, on repeat, like some sort of Manchurian Candidate type instruction directing me to assassinate my own sanity.

The song varies as does the genre.

Sometimes I know why the song is there. The morning after attending a concert, my favorite track of the night will be the feature. Other times, I have no idea why or how the song got stuck in my head, especially when it is a song I haven’t thought about in years.

The arrival of said music bothers me. Not in the way weird dreams bother me. While those might be trippy and strange, I can usually draw parallels, connect them to recent incidents that prompted the previous night’s surreal exploration. Plus, their memory fades quickly after I wake up.

This music, however, exhausts me because I don’t know where it came from. I wonder if others have a similar experience as I.

Years ago I was directing a play where, during rehearsals, one of the actors would constantly sing the first few bars of “On the Street Where You Live” from My Fair Lady.

I have often walked…

Finally, his scene partner asked him why he kept singing that song. “It’s in my head,” he said, “It’s always in my head.”

It was incredibly gratifying to hear. I no longer felt alone. Especially since I was in the midst of a 2-year relationship with a song that would play in my head every time I stepped into the shower.

It was a song I loved but no longer wanted to hear. I was powerless against it. I am sure at a certain point, my unconscious association became an actual one, a routine. Clothes off, water on, curtain closed, and then…

Hold on little girl

Show me what he’s done to you

Stand up little girl

A broken heart can’t be that bad

Mr. Big’s “To Be With You”, the chart-topper from the early 1990s, became the musical sponsor of my shower. It was like the intro music for a baseball player taking the field… except I was not a baseball player, I was taking no field, and I was naked.

Even writing this now, I am a little bit nervous “To Be With You”, which is still one of my favorite songs of all time, by the way, is going to renew its prevalence amongst the frayed synapses of my brain so as to become another two year investment I can’t escape.

I haven’t “listened” to the same song in the shower so many times since I was growing up. I would play the same tapes over and over on the purple Sharp radio cassette player in the bathroom I shared with my sister.

It was a lot of Ska music in those days, mainly a mixtape my friend John had made me. One of those songs was “Let’s Go To Canada” by a band called Five Iron Frenzy. The lyrics started with:

Welcome to Canada

It’s the maple leaf state

Over the past two years I have been in Canada quite a bit and every frigging time I get there, when the plane lands, or I step out of the airport, that song starts up in my head like an annoying toddler in the backseat who wants to listen to “The Wheels on the Bus” for the 100th time.

Less annoying, for me at least, is my relationship with the soundtrack from Disney’s Aladdin. I have a profound and deep affection for it. Not only because it is a fantastic film and one of my favorites from childhood, but the songs are so addicting. My sister and I spent almost an entire summer planning and rehearsing a neighborhood production to be put on in the backyard.

For several reasons, including the fact we were incompetent children trying to put on a homemade Disney musical, the production never occurred.

But Aladdin’s soundtrack provides one of the two songs I sing to my girlfriend the most. Any time I show her something new, I watch her electric eyes shift immediately to an angry squint as I start to sing:

I can show you the world

Shining shimmering splennnnndid

I can’t sing to begin with but it doesn’t help that I make it sound like I am a terrible Broadway wannabe wringing all joy out of each note with overdone, amateur, vibrato.

The song has become tied to my ability to surprise and excite her.

The other song I enjoy singing, which has no lyrics for me to ruin, is the theme song from Jurassic Park. This I like to sing on adventures, big hikes, new countries.

But Aladdin and Jurassic Park are like weapons in a holster close at hand, whereas the rest of the songs in my head are like a shiv I woke up to find is stuck in my ear canal.

This unwilling attachment happens with standup comedy as well. I have a faculty for remembering the wording and cadence of jokes. It is even worse than the songs I cannot evict. These punchlines are a single revolution of a record with a scratch in it. That line will play itself back to back to back. The variance and nuance of the voice and delivery so clear as if actually audible.

There is a comfort I feel in thinking about these lines though. A texture I crave. A smooth pebble with a subtle pattern I can’t stop thumbing.

After many years, I am finally learning how to deal with whatever this auditory addiction is. I have discovered in order to turn off the song in my head, I have to actually listen to the song in real life. Regardless of whether I want to or not, it is an itch I have to scratch. Not doing so, failing to make that 3-minute commitment, ensures the song will continue playing until I feel the need to scream over the noise nobody else can here.

These songs do strange things to me.

I suppose that is what happens when you are born with a mind craving constant stimulation. My brain attaches itself to sounds for reasons I do not understand. Between my ears is a self-playing jukebox of random junk that requires no coins.

Sometimes all I can do is sing along.

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