Heavy Rotation: Why We Never Tire of Our Favorite Jams

When Izzie was a tod­dler, she loved Laurie Berkner, the so-called Queen of Kid’s Music. Her kindie rock songs were sweet and fun and always had a mon­ster hook. None more so than Boots, a song about stomp­ing around in – you guessed it – boots. Black boots. Frog boots. Rain boots. All the boots.

B‑O-O-T‑S boots!
B‑O-O-T‑S black boots

In my boots (stomp, stomp)
In my boots (stomp, stomp)
I stomp around in my black boots

With apolo­gies to those par­ents who had their kids in the ear­ly 2000’s (because now this song is stuck in your head, am I right?), but my child, who is now a teenag­er, can still hear this song and start rock­ing out. I loved it too, the first hun­dred or so times I heard it. Yet after about the 10,000^th lis­ten, it start­ed haunt­ing my dreams. I still have a vis­cer­al reac­tion if it comes up on shuf­fle, a brain that screams, “Not again! No. More. Boots!”

I start­ed think­ing about Boots last week when Garth Brooks’ clas­sic Standing Outside the Fire came up on my dai­ly walk around The Circle and I lost my mind, danc­ing in the mid­dle of the road and scream­ing the lyrics in delight, fist bump raised to the heav­ens in synch with every drum beat. I’ve had it on repeat ever since.

Back before the iPod, remem­ber the songs you would wait hours to hear on the radio? You prob­a­bly had your tape recorder sit­ting beside the boom box so that you could record that gem onto a mix tape. For me the songs on that mag­i­cal mix tape come back eas­i­ly. Thriller. Time After Time. You’re the Inspiration. Hold On. Don’t Stop Believin’. And even now, when these songs come on, I roll down the win­dows, turn up the vol­ume, and sing at the top of my lungs.

So why do we love cer­tain songs, nev­er tir­ing of them, while oth­ers grow stale after a few listens?

Sociology calls this the mere expo­sure effect. Basically, sim­ple famil­iar­i­ty – even sub­lim­i­nal­ly – makes you like things more. It goes back to evo­lu­tion, which favors those traits that help us sur­vive. Our ances­tors learned quick­ly to trust what they already knew but dis­trust the nov­el. If you expe­ri­enced some­thing once and it didn’t kill you, chances were pret­ty good that it wouldn’t kill you the sec­ond time. So the more you hear it, the “safer” it feels and the more you enjoy it.

But this doesn’t explain why Standing Outside the Fire makes me hap­py-dance but Boots makes me want to punch a wall. So I dug deep­er and learned that “our jams” become so based on two things: emo­tion­al response and com­plex­i­ty of arrangement.

Let’s look at arrange­ment com­plex­i­ty first. Humans love the famil­iar, because it makes us feel safe, right? But when our basic needs have been met – food, shel­ter, sex – we also crave a lit­tle vari­ety. Our jams are usu­al­ly ones that are lay­ered in such a way that we might notice new things upon dif­fer­ent lis­tens. In the case of Garth, you have his unique voice, that dri­ving drum­beat, that smok­ing fid­dle. Yet I prob­a­bly heard this song a hun­dred times before I noticed the man­dolin or caught Trisha Yearwood’s har­mo­ny vocals.

But even more impor­tant is the emo­tion­al punch a great song deliv­ers. This is music’s mag­ic. I remem­ber hear­ing Garth’s song at a fra­ter­ni­ty par­ty in col­lege for the first time. My besties and I twirled and boo­gied, solo cups raised in that gid­dy free­dom ded­i­cat­ed to being young and unen­cum­bered and just a lit­tle tip­sy. Gwen was even wear­ing a yel­low and black “mo bet­ta” shirt, a west­ern-style shirt with block col­or­ing that Garth made famous. 

That mem­o­ry alone would be enough to cement it as a life­time jam. But then I read the lyrics (on the CD lin­er notes, of course). Life is not tried, it is mere­ly sur­vived if you’re stand­ing out­side the fire. His med­i­ta­tion on courage is beau­ti­ful­ly writ­ten poet­ry and affect­ed me as deeply as a Shakespearean sonnet. 

And who can for­get the accom­pa­ny­ing music video fea­tur­ing the boy with Down Syndrome? His dad and coach encour­age him to sign up for the Special Olympics but he is adamant about run­ning for the real track and field team. YouTube this video imme­di­ate­ly if you haven’t seen it (I won’t ruin the end­ing, but if you don’t tear up you may have a heart of ice). Then we final­ly see Garth and his gui­tar in front of those bleach­ers on fire and well, come on. That’s just great sto­ry­telling. You’re left feel­ing all the good feels. The emo­tion­al pay­off of a song we love is a reli­able shot of dopamine and sero­tonin, no risky behav­ior necessary.

And we love what we love. So find that guilty plea­sure that makes you grab a whisk and sing-dance around your kitchen. And place that suck­er on repeat.

Just as long as it’s not Laurie Berkner.

Editor’s note: Erin wrote this sto­ry in 2019, and we thought the mes­sage was strong and time­less, so we includ­ed it in our “best of Erin Smith” sum­mer series. Sadly, the video ref­er­enced appears to no longer be avail­able on YouTube. We did find a low-qual­i­ty ver­sion that was record­ed from a tele­vi­sion broad­cast. Hopefully it will still be avail­able when you read this. Here is the YouTube link to that video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT7VuPAnA2U&list=RDyT7VuPAnA2U&start_radio=1