You’re So Vain by Carly Simon
What is an earworm?
It’s a snatch or a snippet, a captured fragment, a line or two, or maybe a bit more, that stays in your head and keeps bubbling up accompanying your day.
It’s part of the language of your landscape that stays in your mind, whether it’s one single line, a couplet or maybe a whole verse, from a poem or song, or a part of a speech from a play, or a quote from a book, or something you heard somebody say, that won’t let you go.
Sometimes it won’t involve what we call language in the everyday. It could be purely a musical phrase that plays on your time, on a loop that follows you through day and night.
That’s what an earworm is. And so is this…
You’re So Vain by Carly Simon
Released Dec 1972. UK chart peak №3 US chart peak №1
This came up in a Zoom conversation with my old college pal this week- it’s Holloween night at the time of writing- when he was asking me what I’d been up to, and said something like “Have you been playing on your yacht?””
That was all we needed to trigger this song. We both reached for this same reference point at the same time.
