I get a lot of songs stuck in my head*. It happens a couple of ways. One is that the lyrics and music will repeat themselves in my head, like I'm subconsciously singing it to myself. The other way is that I will actually hallucinate that I am hearing the song. It's happening right now. It doesn't happen in silence, but when there's white noise around. I'm really hearing something, but my brain molds those sounds into this particular song I was listening to a few minutes ago.

How did that song get stuck in my head? It popped into there because I saw the word "recompense." That threw me into the line "If it's time to recompense for what's done." Do you recognize it? I didn't. It's a Nick Drake song. From The Royal Tenenbaums. I don't have the song, but it's prominent in the movie and easy to hear.

Oddly enough, I don't usually notice the music in movies unless it's in the forefront or my attention is artificially drawn to it. I suppose you generally shouldn't notice the music, or at least the score, unless the filmmaker does it deliberately to add meaning. I don't know, I've never studied film.

However, in the course of my detective work in trying to figure out what song it was, I found this website which discusses the music in that film and the extra layer(s) of meaning it provides. I happen to love the film, and if you don't that's okay, but the way music is selected to provoke exactly the right emotional reaction has always fascinated me, and it's sort of about that.

* Obsessive-compulsive to the max, but at least there's always music in my life.