Episode 46 – “My heart plays the songs of my lost years…”

Welcome to Songs That Don’t Suck, with your host, Mark Bradbourne.

Welcome to Episode 46 of Songs That Don’t Suck. As always, thank you for checking out the episode. We’ve only got a few episodes left in Season 1, and I’m sitting here and I honestly can’t believe that I’m coming to the end of the first year of the podcast. It’s been awesome, and I really appreciate you coming along for the ride.

So this week, for three straight days, I had a song stuck in my head. It was the most wicked of earworms that I have had in recent memory, and it just refused to go away. I had honestly no idea where it came from, and it’s not something that’s in a regular rotation. I like the song, but I don’t remember hearing it recently, so I wasn’t really sure where it came from. The song that I’m talking about is The Love You Save by the Jackson Five. It was literally seared into my brain, and it was all I could hum for three straight days as I’m kind of getting ready for my workday. And what would happen is I would get down to my desk, I would throw up Spotify, find the song, play it, and it would basically satisfy the hunger that my brain had for this song. And I was able to kind of continue on with my day.

And just coincidentally, a listener of the show, Debbie, had sent me a message and attached a really interesting article that talked about earworms and people who find no joy in music. The whole idea of finding no joy in music made me really, really sad, and maybe that’s a topic for another episode, but even that thought just kind of bums me out. But I’m focusing on earworms, and I like the fact that even people who don’t find joy in music get earworms, because it just becomes a universal, intrusive thought. So earworms, or as one article I found in my research referred to it as Stuck Song Syndrome, is a really interesting kind of idea and concept, the fact that we don’t really know what causes it. Scientists refer to this as involuntary musical imagery. And if you’ve seen the movie Inside Out from Pixar, there’s this one scene where there’s these little memory minions who just will randomly pull memories off the shelf and throw them into kind of the chamber that makes the person think about these things. And I always laugh at that scene because every time I have an earworm or I have a really random memory that comes in, I picture those little bastards that work in my brain and I’m like, guys, take a break, because it’s just ridiculous.

But anyway, so like I said, there’s been some research around earworms and there’s no real definitive cause that has been found. Some scientists have linked it to exposure frequency. Others have talked about being tied to emotional states. And others are just associated with certain memories. So if you think about a certain memory, there may have been a song playing, especially in your younger days when the brain is still forming. The brain will actually attach the memory to the song that happened to be playing at that time. The one thing that we know from kind of cognitive science is that the brain likes to form patterns. And these do kind of tend to be in some sort of pattern, although we don’t really understand a lot of the science around it. There’s been some other research that has actually suggested links to mental health issues like anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. They also found people with high levels of neuroticism apparently experience very regular earworms. It’s one of those things that you’re not going to hear a lot of research on. It’s not like it’s life-threatening in any way, shape, or form.

So there’s not going to be millions and millions of dollars of research money that comes in. But it’s one of those weird things that the human body does, which can make you kind of really frustrated or make you laugh or make you think of someone that you haven’t thought about in a while. Or in my case, think about the Jackson 5. So I did find some tips to help end earworms if you’re suffering from one. This is very light research that I found, so your mileage may vary.

The first thing that I found is chewing gum apparently will interrupt the rhythmic neural patterns that develop. So chewing gum can break the cycle of an earworm. Doing puzzles like crosswords, anagrams, sudoku, those things can distract the mind away from the song. And as I mentioned, kind of as I was talking about my whole Jackson 5 experience, I will just give into my brain’s intrusive thoughts and I will play the song at full blast to really kind of scratch the itch. And then like I said, I can kind of continue on with my day. So what is the earworm that you’ve experienced? I’d love for you to like tag me on social media and let me know what your random song blasts into your brain on a regular, because it’s really funny. I had posted on social media and one person accidentally Rick rolled themselves in the process of me asking the question, so I kind of felt bad. But at the same time, it did make me laugh.

All right. This week’s brain bending cover is historical and timely, and it’s a cover of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Punch Brothers.

Thanks to my buddy Clayton for recommending this one. We were playing disc golf this week and he is a regular listener to the show. He’s one of the regular feedback people that will tell me if the show is, you know, good, if it’s bad, if I’m wrong on a song that I think it sounds like something. And as we were kind of finishing up our round, he asked me if I had a like a cover for the week. And I was like, no, I don’t. I’ve got a couple that I was kind of tossing around, but I didn’t really have a solid choice yet. And he said that I should try to cover of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald since the anniversary of its sinking was that week. As I was searching through Spotify, I came to find one and only one of Gordon Lightfoot’s most well-known songs, and I honestly have to say, personally, I like the cover better than the original. I really appreciate kind of this blue grass and almost at times very Celtic feel that the Punch Brothers brought to the song. And it’s not a song that I’ve listened to a whole lot, Gordon Lightfoot isn’t on my regular rotation in any way, shape, or form. But I really enjoyed listening to the Punch Brothers cover of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

All right, let’s get into new music for this week. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, welcome. Again, I appreciate you being here. The long and short of it is I listen to a bunch of music each week. It majority sucks. It’s a painful process and a lot of times I see the same artist pushing out more and more garbage and I just roll my eyes and I’m surprised that I haven’t strained my eyes yet or like pulled something because of the amount of eye rolling I do. But anyway, like I said, I listen to hundreds of songs each week and I hope to find a handful that I can share with you each week here on the podcast. And I feel like I’m successful most of the times.

So let’s get into this week’s songs.

The first song this week is Mozart In My Mind from slimdan. This definitely has a 90s vibe for me and I can’t put my finger on exactly what song this reminds me of. There’s a few things like lyrically, like I feel like it’s almost Mellow Gold like early Beck, perhaps, but I’ll be damned if I can put my finger on exactly what I want to compare this to. I feel like it was probably a band that I heard back in the day on like MTV’s 120 minutes show. If anybody remembers that one, maybe it’s like Nada Surff, maybe Neutral Milk Hotel. I don’t know. There’s a lot of those things maybe I play, but they don’t feel right. If you can name the band that I’m really thinking of, please let me know because it’s kind of driving me nuts. Regardless, it’s got a really cool feel to it. I really like the way the vocals are kind of layered throughout the whole song. I think there are three people in this band. I could be wrong, but I think there’s three. It’s got a really nice effect when you layer those vocals, especially with a very stripped down arrangement like the acoustic guitar is very raw, some light drums, a little keyboard thing here and there, and then kind of the last third of the song towards the end of the song. I probably hear where I got Beck from and there’s like this little bit of turntable scratching that happens and that kind of brings the song to its outro, which is kind of cool. Overall, this is kind of a really chilled track and I thought it was a great way to start the podcast this week.

The second song this week is Waves by DaytimeTV.

This song continues to kind of blow my mind because rhythmically, there are some really syncopated things happening between both the drums and the vocals, which gives it this really cool kind of push and pull that is happening kind of throughout the song. In the second verse, the drums really fall in and out and I had to like listen to just that section a few times just to kind of wrap my brain around what was happening. The drums kind of doing that, kind of falling in and out, build this really amazing tension that leads back into the pre-chorus and chorus and the chorus is just super catchy and it honestly, there’s moments where it reminds me of something like that I would hear in like a hard 80s pop like that would be on like a Brat Pack movie soundtrack. The production is outstanding and I really dug this one this week.

The third song this week is Young in America from Barnes Courtney.

I’ve seen Barnes Courtney all over the playlist this year and I’ve listened to them several times and I’ve never really been able to connect with anything up to now. This one got me and now I feel like I need to kind of go back and try again because I have an anchor point. This one for me, it has a very strong killer’s vibe, but they’ve definitely got their own thing going on. I love the straight ahead rock feel of this one. The lyrics are fantastic. One of my favorite features on Spotify now is you actually can get the lyrics for some of the songs, not all of the songs, but you can get the lyrics. So it was really kind of cool to read down through some of the phrases that Barnes Courtney had put together. The song overall kind of feels a little bit nostalgic in a way and it’s probably why I connected to it this week. One of the really distinctive things that I’ve been finding in this track is the vocalist has this really amazing kind of break and gravel in his voice when he decides to summon it on some of those really long sustained notes when they’re just kind of adding this tension and emotion throughout the chorus. Really good stuff from Barnes Courtney.

The fourth song this week is Panic Attack from Judas Priest.

My buddy Mike tipped me off to this one a few weeks back, honestly, and I’d kind of forgotten about it. Mike and I had gone and saw Judas Priest on their latest tour, initially got canceled by COVID, but luckily they came back around. And it’s not that this song isn’t great because it is. I mean, Rob Halford is 72 and this song to me sounds very much in the Painkiller era of priests, which is my favorite era of priests to be honest. So two things kind of brought this song back to the forefront and I’m like, damn, why didn’t I include this in the podcast? The first one was I was actually mowing my lawn this week and I tend to mow to metal and this one kind of came in on the shuffle and I was like, damn, this song kicks ass. The second one was I was watching Mark Wahlberg’s Rockstar movie, which if you’re not familiar, it mirrors the Judas Priest story when Rob Hulford left and Tim Ripper Owens, who’s from Akron here, joined Judas Priest. One side note, one of the bands that I played in actually opened for Tim Owens. He had a grunge cover band back in the day and we played this club in Akron called Ron’s Crossroads, which is sadly no longer there. Anyway, for my metalheads in the audience, if you slept on new music from Judas Priest or if you didn’t hear it, it’s time to wake up. Halford’s vocal is flawless. The overall kind of groove riff of this, the solos are awesome, the drums kick ass. I mean, Scott Travis is an amazing drummer and just pumps the energy through this song. It’s honestly really nice to hear kind of the godfathers of metal still pushing out to kick ass songs. I honestly cannot wait to hear the whole album.

All right, that is it for this episode. As always, spread the word to your fellow music fans, follow the show on social media. I am literally everywhere now, X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, I think that’s it. Oh, and TikTok. If you really want to follow me on TikTok, I’m not very entertaining there, I promise. Check out the website, songsthatdon’tsuck. net, you can send me messages through there. You can always give me feedback through there as well. With that, please, Zach, close out the show.

Thanks for listening and until next week, keep searching for and listening to songs that don’t suck.