Most anything will make me think of a pop song. Sometimes I’ll have a song in my head and realize it got there not because I overheard it, but because of something I saw or something someone said. (When I lived with Andie, we’d often break out into the same bit of a song simultaneously just after a verbal cue—a word or two that would remind us of a lyric. Unfortunately, I cannot recall one example of this magnificent and curious condition; perhaps she can.)
But, say, when I’m walking to work, maybe I see a bus and hum the refrain from the Who’s “Magic Bus.” A Staples truck passes and I make the office-supply connection with “The Rubberband Man” by the Spinners (although the song was used in an OfficeMax commercial).
On Broadway, I find myself whistling the Drifters’ “On Broadway”. On the tiny TV screen in an elevator of my office building, a PSA for lupus makes me remix Suzanne Vega’s “Luka” (“my name is lupus/I induce a facial rash”). And at my desk, when a woman named Rita calls, I think immediately of “Lovely Rita” from Sgt. Pepper’s.
This isn’t as chronic as I imply—I’m not debilitated or even distracted by the phantom strains of thousands of pop hits from yesterday and today. But do free-associations like these happen to you, too?