3/5/2023 0 Comments Ear worm jazz song![]() After all, the actual tune isn’t bad, and the guitar sounds are great, but those aren’t the first thing you remember. “Song 2” isn’t quite a one-trick pony, though. Ditto Blur’s “Song 2,” probably the only hit song in the past 25 years to run a concise two minutes and two seconds. One groundbreaker would be the C+C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now).” You may not remember a single thing about the rest of the song, but that one vocal sample (sung by one of The Weather Girls, of “It’s Raining Men” infamy) is with you forever. It’s just strange enough to throw you off, but he also throws in an attractive bit of melody, once again resolving the tension in the verses with the line, “How wrong can I be before I am right?” So Costello’s hooked you three times: once with a clever bit of wordplay, then with the exotic sound of the vocals, and finally with one of his then-trademark, relationship-on-the-rocks lyric lines. One is a near-whisper, the other a strange falsetto. But the song’s actual chorus hook comes just afterward, and it’s one that benefits from the element of surprise.Ĭostello sings the verses of “Tears Before Bedtime” in his familiar clipped voice, but he sings the chorus in two overdubbed voices, both of them uncharacteristic. ![]() On the Imperial Bedroom track “Tears Before Bedtime,” the last line before the first chorus is “That’s the problem, and here’s the hook” – referring to the tense situation between the two characters in the song. In one memorable case, he told you just when it was coming. Costello was always fiendishly smart about writing hooks. The “shoot, shoot” chorus stuck with us from get-go. On “SOS,” the verses are cabaret-style – the song’s a torch ballad until the chorus kicks in as full-throttle synthesizer pop, and it only intensifies the sense of yearning that was in the verses.įor these pop-trained ears, Elvis Costello’ s, “Watching The Detectives” was also an earworm. ABBA were pretty big on contrasts overall sometimes they even set up a chorus by putting the verses in a different musical style altogether. Unlike many of ABBA’s later hits, “Ring” leans pretty heavily on one five-note keyboard riff, which opens the song and underlines all the verses.īut there’s a short bridge into the choruses where the group’s two female singers, Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, are briefly accompanied only by pounding drums, and that bit of aggression is what really grabs you (then the keyboard lick re-enters for the chorus). ![]() The group’s first international hit, “Ring,” placed Top 3 in the 1973 Eurovision song contest – which was Earworm Central at that time. And since “Bad Romance” is essentially a seduction song, it’s only fitting that it seduces your ears in so many ways.Ī classic pop hook can be an earworm as well, and ABBA songwriters Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson were masters of both. It’s a trademark to Gaga’s ingenuity that she throws so many lures into a song that still flows smoothly. You could remove the chant altogether and the song would still work. It sets up each of the three verses, then Gaga brings it back unaccompanied at the very end of the song – but only after she’s done a few repeats of the chorus. Any one of those would be enough to make the song a hit.Īnd though the “oh-la-la” chant is the actual earworm, it’s not even in the majority of the song. The melodic hook in the chorus (which could just as easily have come from an old Supremes record) and the verse hook (“Love, love, love, I want your love”), plus the surprise of a near-rap (“Walk, walk, passion baby”) bridge toward the end. An earworm doesn’t even need to be the song’s actual hook: “Bad Romance,” for instance, already has two or three hooks in it. This made them easier to sing, and thus easier to recall. The study used a piece of melody analysis software to determine that earworm songs had notes with longer durations and smaller pitch intervals. But here comes the insidious part: The actual order of notes does a job on your subconscious, and songs with a “common global melodic contour” – that is, songs whose melodies unfold in a way that matches your subconscious expectations – are the wormiest ones. If you hear the song on the radio all the time, it’s probably earworm-bound. Some of it was just common sense.Ĭhart hits are more likely to be earworms than deep cuts. But a 2016 study by the American Psychological Association attempted to do just that, figuring out what triggers “involuntary musical imagery” – a fancy term for “earworm” – and also tallying which songs were most often named as examples. If we could pinpoint exactly how to write an earworm, a lot of pop songwriters would be out of work. Click to load video How do you write an earworm?
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