Confessions of Fangirl

Sometimes I get super obsessed with a song and I’ll listen to it over and over again for hours. There is one song that I listened to on repeat all day on my work days at iTunes as well as every minute of every drive and commute I made. It's amazing how one song or piece of music can entrance and be-spell a person. Or at least me, anyway. I don’t know if other people do this. I’m sure I’m not the only one in all the world, but I’m also wondering if it’s something that a significant portion of the population does or just a small percentage of people. And I also wonder if there are correlations between this kind of obsession and things like general anxiety disorder, neuro-divergence, obsessive compulsive disorders, or other things. I’m not trying to compare, pigeonhole, or disparage any of those things. I’m just wondering if doing that sort of thing, listening to the same song over and over again, is a type of self-soothing behavior. Not that it matters I guess.

I think I’ve mentioned this in past posts, but I hate calling this piece of music a “song” because there isn’t any real “singing.” I know that “song” probably has a much less strict definition than it once did, but something about calling a piece of music that doesn’t contain any singing a “song” niggles at my brain. Go figure. However, for the sake of simplicity and time and space, I'm going to use the word "song" for this musical piece.

In case you’re thinking that everyone listen to songs on repeat (I know they do), I think I should break it down a little further. And everyone should understand that I’m not exaggerating. My supervisor could (and would) pull up my screen at any time and she would always see my listening to the same song on repeat--always. She would give me crap for it. Not in a mean way, we were friends, but in all earnestness.

The song is approximately four minutes long (plus an extra few seconds) meaning that just in the time I listened at work in a day, I would’ve listened to it approximately 105 times.

I also had a boyfriend that lived over an hour away from me and I’d listen to it on repeat for every journey to and from his house that I made. My commute to work was close to an hour each way from my home, and those drives, too, were filled with this same song.

I did this for months, maybe a year. You would think after I listened to it THAT often, through that much of my life, that I would grow sick of the song and never want to hear it again. Surely listening to the same song thousands of times, maybe even hundreds of thousands of times all said and done, would leave me sick of the thing.

That is where you would be wrong.

I still love that song. Every once in a while I will put the same damn song on repeat. It’s especially great when I’m writing or working. There aren’t any real lyrics and something about having a song on repeat is helpful at times for my focus.

In case any of you are wondering what song it is that I’m talking about, it’s “IDGAFOS” by Dillon Francis. The song is about eight years old now and I’ve been obsessed with it since I found it sometime in late 2011. There are a few other songs that I’ve gotten addicted to for a span of time, but none like that one. I don’t think it would be a fallacy for me to say that I have a somewhat obsessive personality, in general, but my love for that song may take the cake. Unlike some of my other obsessions, like Harry Potter or Avengers, I don’t dive deeply into the background or the people behind the song or anything like that. I know practically nothing about Dillon Francis. I’ve listened to a couple of his other songs, but nothing I could name off hand or that I’ve listened to over and over on repeat. I don’t know what inspired him to make that piece of music or what went into making it. I just really love listening to that song.

I’m not even kidding about still loving to listen to it either. I’ve listened to it at least twice in the last twenty four hour period, including once while writing this post.

Sometimes I wish I had the words to describe why this song speaks to me and resonates with me so deeply, but I don’t. Maybe one day something with click or unlock in my brain and I’ll be able to explain exactly why this song enraptures me. Though I think it’s more likely that I’ll go through my life loving this song and never fully understanding why. That’s okay though. I think having the song is enough.