Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of — U2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSoNWE4j36U

There's something about music that gets stuck. Maybe it's a certain riff, or a melody, or just how something sounds, but I've never gotten movies or books stuck in my head the same way I've gotten music stuck. Earworms, they're called. I don't know why — but would I want to?

I was at a sleepover, many, many years ago. I must've been ten or eleven, and I hadn't been to too many sleepovers before. It was a new house and it rubbed me the wrong way. I couldn't get comfortable, and I kept using the bathroom, and I just couldn't fall asleep. And this song — Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of, by U2 — which I'd just heard off a mixtape was somehow... just there, simmering, under the surface, waiting for all the other activity in my brain to stop so it could play.

And it did. For eight straight hours, I lay there, staring at the ceiling, listening to this one song by U2 in my head on repeat. I didn't get any sleep that night.

And the song got stuck, permanently. Whenever I can't sleep, whenever I have even a half-hour's extra wakefulness, I start to get nervous: what if this is one of those nights where I just can't get to sleep? And the opening drum riff begins.

Perhaps it is a testament to U2 as a band that I can still listen to them. It is a damn good song.