This summer I noticed a pattern to my interior life. Almost every single morning, I wake up with a song in my head. This has been true at least since college, but I’ve never paid much attention to the phenomenon because I have other things to worry about in the morning (namely, the fact that it is the morning and I don’t want it to be that).

But during a stint of recovery from surgery I noticed that one song in particular was in my head every morning for close to a week. I started paying more attention to this mental background noise and realized that (after I moved past that sticky track) there wasn’t much of a discernible pattern to which songs got lodged there. They weren’t always songs I had listened to the day before, or even all that recently.

In August, I decided it was time to start collecting data in order to get to the bottom of this. I stashed a spare notebook in my nightstand and got in the habit of writing down what was in there upon waking each morning. Then I put everything into a Google Sheet and started slinging around some pivot tables.

Here are my results from the past five months.

Mornings with a song stuck in my head: 98 out of 135Some days I just forgot to take note (especially in the early days before I got in the habit) and some days were empty headed–but truly most days there was a song in there.

Longest streak of consecutive mornings with a song stuck in my head: 17Most popular songs

• “Juniper,” by Katy Kirby (3 days)
• “Dog Hill,” by Andrew Montana (3 days)
• “Worry Not There Are Galaxies You Haven’t Heard Of,” by Tom Rosenthal (2 days)
• “Valk,” by Vulfom (2 days)
• “Someone Singing With Me,” by Joe Purdy and Amber Rubarth (2 days)
• “Leave the Light On,” by Chris Smither (2 days)
• “La Giocona,” by Vulfpeck (2 days)
• “Abigail,” by Paolo Nutini (2 days)
• “500 Miles,” by The Proclaimers (2 days)

None of these were listed as a Top Song in my Spotify Wrapped. Mostly they were just songs I had listened to at some point, but sometimes they were from a movie or TV show, a YouTube clip, or from… just the world? (“The Green Grass Grew All Around” made an appearance on December 26.) 

What’s most interesting to me here is that this means that there was a total of 87 different songs that made an appearance with 76 of them only showing up one time (87%).

Most random songs

• “Catch Your Dreams,” by Andy from Parks and Rec (September 14)
• The Hobbit drinking song Merry and Pippin sing in Return of the King (September 25)
• “You’re So Vain,” Carly Simon (October 14). This is one of those songs that I just know but I have truly no clue when I last listened to it.
• “Sons and Daughters,” by the Decemberists (November 10). This one I do remember very specifically my last listen—and it was in July.
• “Golden,” by Huntr/x (November 21). Guys. I haven’t seen this movie. How’d it get in there?
• “You Are My Sunshine,” but a version that doesn’t exist (December 17). I thought it was the one from O Brother, Where Art Thou? that George Clooney’s daughters sang, but turns out they only did “In the Highways” and “Angel Band.” So I guess my brain took voices from a movie I haven’t seen in years and had them sing a different song from that movie.

Most popular artists

• Andrew Montana (6 days)
• Vulfmon (5 days)
• The A’s (3 days)
• Paul Zach (3 days)
• Katy Kirby (3 days)
• And then twelve others all tied at two days each. 

Paul Zach was the only one of these to show up as a Top Artist in my Spotify Wrapped. In total, 73 artists were represented, with 54 only showing up one time (74%). From this I conclude: my brain is all over the place.

And now, onto the question that prompted this whole endeavor: where are these songs coming from? Or more specifically, when are they coming from? Since I couldn’t always remember an exact date of last encounter, and to make my data easier to use, I chose a list of time buckets to sort every song into. Here’s what I found:

Time since I last actually listened to the song:“?” meaning I don’t remember but it’s been awhile and “??” meaning I don’t remember and I can’t even fathom when I would’ve encountered it. 

My favorite bit from this stat is that “?” is basically as frequent as “yesterday.” And if I combine “?” and “??,” that beats out even “within the last week” (26 to 24). I would’ve guessed that “yesterday” would’ve been the winner, but it would appear that my subconscious is a strange incubator that receives inputs, lets them swill about for a bit, and then tosses them back up with no discernible pattern. I’m just as likely to wake up with a song from three months ago as I am yesterday.

After all of this work, am I any closer to understanding this phenomenon? No. Songs consistently appear but without an intelligible pattern. 

Will I be doing another round covering all of 2026? Absolutely.

I hope you have enjoyed this foray into data collecting on myself.

Christina Ribbens

Christina Ribbens (’19) studied history, studio art, and data science at Calvin and public humanities at Georgetown. She now lives in the part of Virginia that’s almost Washington, DC where she helps award grants to arts nonprofits. She takes a lot of walks to admire the landscaping in peoples’ front yards, mostly listens to British comedians’ podcasts, and likes to make friends via sports.