Health and Medicine

My Quest to Exterminate an Earworm

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We all get songs stuck in our head. Sometimes they stay for a few hours before disappearing into the ether; others pitch a tent and camp out for a few days. (My personal best/worst happened in fifth grade, when I was haunted by “Exhale (Shoop Shoop)” for an entire week.) But there are rare cases, like Marianne Eloise’s, whose stuck-song predicament almost assuredly beats yours. For several years, she had a random Fall Out Boy B-side “rattling around her brain like a loose marble,” as she writes in this essay. It followed her everywhere: errands, a trip to Paris, her marriage proposal. It’s not that she hated Fall Out Boy — they’re one of her favorite bands — but it was making her crazy: “I spent years being driven to near derangement by a track I never really liked in the first place.” So Marianne did what anyone haunted by the ghost of Patrick Stump’s voice would: She searched for a cure.

—Alex Suskind, senior editor, Vulture

My Quest to Exterminate an Earworm What happens when a Fall Out Boy song gets stuck in your head — and never leaves?

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty
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