I'm Addicted to Repeating Same Songs Over and Over - A Curse and a Blessing

Does it happen to you? You're scrolling down your music player, trying to find something interesting, but neither song is the right one. Except the one you've been obsessing over the last few days or weeks. You hit play, turn on repeat and surrender to the beautiful sound wishing it to never stop. And so you listen to it over and over until you've listened to it so much it makes you want to kill yourself.

I'm one of those hopeless cases. I listen to some band, checking out their stuff, and then I discover that one song and decide it's so amazing it makes others pretty mediocre. So it goes in the loop. It's pretty brutal.

Usually, the song is catchy, maybe it has interesting rhythm, great singalong lyrics, unusual guitar or vocal part that begs me to get back to it over and over again. It's not an earworm, at least not in the beginning, in the obsessive phase. I try to move on and listen to band's other songs, but soon enough I'll go back to 'the one'.

The one song to rule them all.

And eventually, sometimes it's few days, sometimes it's few weeks, the inevitable happens - I get bored or annoyed by it, and start avoiding it in the foreseeable future. That's when I often discover another song from the band and decide that's actually the best one. And you know what happens next.

So it's usually like this:

• Repeat over and over
• People around you become annoyed by it
• You tell everyone about it and how amazing it is
• When someone interrupts you while listening, you have to play it from the beginning
• At some point, you are so annoyed you just want to make it stop
• You get over it the moment you discover new one

I guess repeating same songs over and over like there's no end to it happens when you find some similarity in it with your own life, at least that's what most of comments on this topic suggest. The thing is, I listen to a lot of folk, melodic death metal stuff that takes inspiration from ancient wanderers from the north, from warriors, from Tolkien's world and his characters. Does that mean I'm a reincarnated soul of an old Viking? Or an escapee from Middle Earth? (Its an interesting path to explore, so I'll be digging deeper into this in one of my future posts.)

Good thing about this is that every once in a while I would find some new gem from the band I'm listening that completely blows my mind. And I would become obsessed about it. On the other side, when its trial period of being my favorite song expires, I have to distance myself from it. Even when I return to it after a while, there's still bad taste about it, a memory of how annoying it once was.

I'm aware of this habit and I try to force myself to keep the repeat button turned off. Still, if you look at my music stats on last.fm you can see that just in the last month I have listened some songs over 100 times. That's right! It's pretty bad, guys.

What about you? Am I the only weirdo that experience this?

---

If you like this post, don't forget to upvote, comment and resteem it. Also make sure to follow @alcibiades to stay updated about future posts .