As far back as I can remember, the sound of KT Tunstall’s ‘Other Side of the World’ has never been far from my psyche. I know that’s not quite up there with Goodfellas for an opening gambit, but the song’s intrusive insistence has steadily become such a fascination for me that I’ve sought the help of psychologists and anthropologists to get to the bottom of it.

It started in a manner that I barely noticed. As a child, I’d simply hum it more than most of the songs I heard on the radio. In my teens, it crept into my cranium so often I began to question whether I liked it—I wondered whether fate had decreed that I was set to be a rare KT Tunstall guy, and my subconscious was continually keen to remind me of that. By my late teens, I realised I didn’t like the song and that I wasn’t to be a KT Tunstall guy. In the interim years, I have mellowed and figured out I don’t care much about it one way or the other.

However, that has not stopped the song from being a psychological hiccup that springs into my mind in a routinely random manner, maybe a few times a week. Astonishingly, I have since come to learn that I am not alone. We are out there, millions of us walking among you, the not-so-rare, after all, secret KT Tunstall guys. There’s an army of us muttering, "Oooover the sea and far away…"

Likewise, there are secret Katie Melua guys humming the same refrain from ‘Nine Million Bicycles’ endlessly. There are also Wilson Pickett people, the ‘Mambo No 5’ followers, Travis addicts, and those poor, tormented souls who have never been able to shift ‘I’m Blue’. One day, after I finally opened up to my friends about my ‘Other Side of the World’ problem, we collectively crowned this phenomenon an individual’s ‘Default Song’.

As I opened up, I found out I was one among many. All my friends were haunted by a single song in a similar manner, too. You see, having a singular track pervasively invade your mind is a very common occurrence. Some people have more than one ‘Default Song’, and we call those ‘The Lucky Ones’, but all in all, the premise remains the same: recurrently, a random song(s) will pop into your head for no rhyme or reason, and you sing a line or two before it disappears back into the deep recesses of your mind.

It must be noted that this is far different from ‘having a song stuck in your head’. With a ‘Default Song’, what’ll happen is you’ll just have five minutes to kill in a dentist’s waiting room, and as your mind drifts, a familiar verse from Alicia Keys will make itself known to you for the 1396th time in your life.

Over the years, the triviality of this thought gained mounting traction and curiosity within me. Why was mine the ‘Other Side of the World’? I pleaded with Dr Concetta Tomaino, the executive director of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, to find out. Her answer alarmed me. "There is always a strong association with either the lyric or the situation related to that song," she tells me, "So whatever you’re experiencing in the moment it comes to mind is triggering the recall of that song."

My worst fears about reaching out to a psychologist for answers were realised. Dr Tomaino was psychoanalysing me in a subtle and diminutive manner. It wasn’t any glib fear of mental medicine that was perturbing me, but the unnerving realisation that the following verse was somehow inexorably linked to my character:

"Over the sea and far away
She’s waiting like an iceberg
Waiting to change
But she’s cold inside
She wants to be like the water"

Dr Tomaino continued: "You know how the images in dreams are really metaphors for something else? These songs that come to mind spontaneously usually pop up because there is either an emotional or some other significance to them. They don’t just pop up for nothing. Something in your brain in the back of your mind is processing something, and it goes, ‘Boom, there’s an association with that song’. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have a reason for popping up."

But why was this reason a mystery to me? I understand that the mind is a web of untold complexity, but, excuse me, a Radio 2 hit from 2004 that I never sought out ever is somehow of psychological significance? If I kept digging, would I find out that this was playing in the car ride home in the moments after I was released from Newcastle Academy—consolidating it as a touchstone to despair ever since? Or did KT Tunstall somehow elucidate the concept of jaded longing to me for the first time, and I have unknowingly been plagued by this disposition my whole adult life? A ‘can of worms‘ aura now haunted the entire investigative enterprise.

In a whirlwind, I stressed the truly anomalous nature of the song’s presence in my life to the smiling, ASMR-like, Dr Tomaino, hoping she would abate her rhetoric that ‘Default Songs’ are essentially synonymous with real-life spirit animals. "We don’t waste brain energy," she mercilessly continued. "Our brains are ruthlessly efficient when it comes to trying to make sense of things and forming connections. So, it’s highly unlikely that something would pop up without a reason."

Then came a joyous olive branch, the peace offering I had been waiting for: "It doesn’t have to be significant. It can just be that on a day when the sky is blue, something like ‘On a Clear Day’ pops into your head. It’s just a quick association with lived experience". So, in my case, I hopefully posited that perhaps it was simply that the ‘icebergs’ lyric meant I was cold, as opposed to helplessly adrift. "It could be that too," she softly, almost reluctantly agreed before making a Titanic analogy related to stress.

This still alarmed me. It is surely the mind of a dullard that has to conjure a folk-pop song to alert itself that it is cold. Does that mean if I lived somewhere hotter, I’d constantly be bombarded by songs from Phil Collin’s No Jacket Required? I needed to expand my scope, purely because I wasn’t willing to accept the scary truth offered up by the kind and considered Dr Tomaino that our default songs are deeply ingrained rather than random oddities.

I sought the expertise of Nick Seaver, the anthropologist behind Computing Taste, a book that delves into music recommendation algorithms. In my eyes, ‘Default Songs’ seemed such a human phenomenon that no machine could ever know their ways. In this regard, I wondered whether they do indeed represent a truer sense of our taste, and ‘Other Side of the World’ keeps popping up because I keep suppressing the fact that I simply love the song. "I don’t think our tastes are ever our own," the leading taste expert informs me.

"It’s an annoying social science answer," the annoying social scientist continues. "In any context where we have taste, we have taste in a world with other people in it. No matter what, we’re always learning about music from outside of ourselves. The music is made by other people. Then, we decide what kind of person we want to be in a world full of other people. There’s a lot of sociology work about how taste maps to social status. I don’t think it makes sense to think of taste as something that is uniquely our own."

Except ‘Default Songs’ do seem to be uniquely our own because they exist outside of our manufactured tastes. In Seaver’s theory, I may well have decided to like David Bowie purely because others whom I admired had liked him before me, but there is no such impulse to willingly conjure "Over the sea and far away" perennially. That would say something very strange indeed about my identity.

Thus, perhaps there is something in the musicology of these songs; maybe a certain chord progression or hook has hacked its way towards leaving an indelible imprint on the homo sapien mind. For this, a larger sample size than myself and my friends is required. Perhaps I could reach out to the government and implore them to include a ‘What’s your Default Song’ question on the next census, or maybe it would be easier for readers to Tweet me their own, and we could run the numbers on the make-up of the results?

The problem I was facing with ‘Default Songs’ was the more I was learning about them, the more complex the picture became. I had opened the box on a world of sociology, psychoanalysis, and musicology that wasn’t aligning neatly. Would I have been better off simply muttering KT Tunstall a few times a week for the rest of my life and batting it off as a bit of an earworm? This line of thinking seems to present the crux of their nature: a ‘Default Song’ can, in effect, go undiagnosed for years.

You might have been too busy to realise that among the songs that get stuck in your head, one isn’t a new pop single being rammed down your throat or a track you listened to on the weekend, but rather a random recurring oddity you haven’t actually heard for months or years, and this song is a permanent fixture in your sorry excuse for an existence.

So, I returned to Dr Tomaino to re-plumb the depths and ensure that my efforts hadn’t been wasted on an invented folly. She reassured me that ‘Default Songs’ were, in fact, very real. Her evidence brought me both great heart but also the same old concerns about what my ‘Other Side of the World’ fixation says about me.

"With most people, there is a song that stays with us. Even in dementia patients, you see it," Tomaino begins. "I had a patient once who had had a stroke. She was in my office for therapy. She was depressed and not feeling well. Previously, she had been the life and soul, playing piano at parties. But now, she was very depressed, and her daughters were concerned that she wouldn’t heel after her open-heart surgery."

"One session, I asked her if she could still play piano," Tomaino recalled. "She said she couldn’t because of the damage from the stroke. But she did say that she had had this song running through her head since waking up from the surgery. It was an old light opera song, ‘Lover, Come Back to Me’. So, I played her a recording of it and sat her behind the piano we had in the office anyway. And she was listening to it and listening to it, and when it came to the very last chord, she actually played it on the piano".

As it happens, that chord was a dawning moment for the previous stricken and plagued patient. "Now, I get it. That was our song!" the woman exclaimed. The Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy version that had entrapped her was first released in 1940. This was when the patient was a young woman in love. But 1940 was a testing time for lovers, and her new husband was soon whisked off to fight on foreign soil in the war. His parting words were to think of this song and keep it in their minds – a sonic cuddle of sorts that wrapped its arms from Brooklyn to Normandy. He’d be back to listen to it with her soon, he said.

He did return, they did listen to it, and they lived happily ever after, too. But a year before her heart surgery, he passed away. So, when the patient knew she had to go under the knife a few months into the grieving process, her prognosis was that she would die too—that she would go back to him, that they would be together again. "So, she had no idea why that song was in her head until she sat behind a piano and heard it in that setting again. It was then my job in therapy to help her transition, and that song was proof she was supposed to be around for a little bit longer. She recovered."

Without sullying that heart-warming story with glibness, she had had her ‘Default Song’ explained. She had gotten to the bottom of it, and it was cognitive, and it was healing, and it was hopeful. Perhaps the same can happen for all of us sinners, wandering around humming "Over the sea…" in a haze and wondering why. The only hope is that it doesn’t take a near-fatal stroke and the death of a beloved spouse to get to the bottom of it.

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