First time I’d heard that song in years. I liked it in the long ago, I liked hearing it at the restaurant, I sort of hummed it on the way home…and I woke up hearing it the next—and the next day, and the next day, and so forth, the biggest earworm I’ve had in ages.
All day long I'd hear "My baby makes me proud--"
Stop, Charlie! I'd think. Stop! Go brag somewhere else.
I’m tired of hearing about your alleged baby and her stupid unsexy hanging hair....
My reply thoughts of course didn't do any good.
The noise in my head grew so annoying that I wrote it into my novel-in-progress. Here, the narrator hears a punk band do a version:
…one of my favorite country songs, a radio staple for years—but now different, punk, rock, angry. Passionate? Possessed? Pissed off. Disgusted. I leaned forward at our little table, listening. How did they do that? It was the same song, but different—from the point of view of a girl, of course, not a guy. But the same, recognizable, familiar and unfamiliar and creepy and weird. The guitar player with his back to the audience, the bass player staring intently out—at me? at someone, anyone—the drummer focused on the singer, and the singer with her face elevated as if in prayer, screaming howling at god or a ghost “And I let my hair! Hang! Down!”—an explaination of something bad that had happened, the whole thing corrosive noisy magic, summing up my life right then, somehow—all the unpleasent loneliness, desperation, boredom…..
Here's the song. Listen at your peril.