312 earworms

It has now become tradition on this blog to post on the last day of the year about the earworms I wake up with every morning. For some reason I rarely wake up without something playing on my inner radio, so I started making notes, and doing the statistics at the end of the year. You can find the previous posts for 2020, 2019, and 2018 on the links. The breakdown:

2018: I woke up with music in my head on 306 mornings, with a total of 150 individual songs in one year

2019: 316 mornings, 137 songs

2020: 346 mornings, 149 songs

This year's stats: 312 mornings, 124 songs. There were 54 that I only had once, the rest repeated multiple times throughout the year. This year I had a large number of songs that kept coming back on four, five, or more occasions. As usual, here is the Top 5 list: 

First place, with 16 mornings, a new personal record:

(I loved this show and the music, and this scene was especially well done. But I did not expect it to stick this much...)

On second, third, and fourth place, we have music from In the Heights. They had absolute success in my brain this year. I woke up to the soundtrack on 66 mornings. The most common, with 10 of those mornings, was this song:

Basically the entire soundtrack made an appearance quite often: Paciencia y fe (8), Respira (7), When you're home (7), It won't be long now (7), Cold champagne (4), Benny's dispatch (3), 96,000 (3), Home all summer (3), Blackout (3), Carnaval del barrio (3), Finale (3), No me diga (2), The club (2), Piragua (1).

In shared third place, also with 8 mornings, I had this classic (I blame The Boys, and the year 2020):

And still in third with 8 mornings, I had the song below, from Julie and the Phantoms. The show was cute but forgettable, but its music stuck: I woke up to it 19 times. Next to this song, I also had Other side of Hollywood (7) and Wake up (4).

The fourth place is equally crowded. Next to In the Heights and Julie, I had an individual contestant here too, from a movie I haven't even seen. I woke up to it on 7 mornings, and it always put me in a feminist mood.

Fifth place goes to three individual contestants, with 6 mornings each:

Next to the Top 5, I have also had a blast with the soundtrack of Encanto. It could not catch up to the others in one month, but it is going strong. So far I have had it stuck in my head on 17 mornings, including today. It has no bad song, which shows in the numbers: All of you (4), Surface pressure (3), Dos oroguitas (3), Family Madrigal (2), What else can I do (2), We don't talk about Bruno (2), Waiting on a miracle (1).

Between Encanto, In the Heights, Moana and Hamilton it seems like this year Lin-Manuel Miranda was single-handedly responsible for a third of my earworm music (95 mornings). 

I am also a little ashamed to admit that the soundtrack of the latest Cinderella movie also stuck, even though the movie was atrociously unwatchable. Still, the music took up 8 of my mornings so far.

And here comes this year's WTF pick: a song I have not heard in decades and has no meaning to me. And yet one day I woke up with this playing in my head.

That's all. The experiment continues. It doesn't really mean anything, but I am greatly entertained by it. Do you have earworms too? What was your music this year?

Happy 2022!