Hooked on a feeling: why do certain songs go round and round – and round – our heads? | Emma Brockes

Streaming of Linda Ronstadt's Long Long Time rose by 4,900% the day after it featured on The Last of Us. It wasn't all because of me

I've been here before, but not for a while. The last attack, from memory, was Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time, but that was quick - I was in and out in two days. Same goes for Petula Clark's Don't Sleep in the Subway. There was a weird period when the needle stuck - no judgment - on Dan Stevens (Dan Stevens!) singing Evermore from the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack, which must have had to do with my then very young children and had to be borne with patience until it worked itself out. There was Macca doing Golden Slumbers. Which reminds me, oh God, of the week I lost to In My Life, except, crucially, it was the 1991 Bette Midler cover version not the Beatles' 1965 original. All I can say is it made sense at the time.

Last week, like the return of a fever dream, I fell into a deep, unfightable obsession with a single song, that in the last seven days I have played on a loop probably hundreds of times. I have listened to it while I'm stacking the dishwasher and making the kids' lunches. It has taken me round the supermarket, and back and forth to a doctor's appointment. My apartment has never been so tidy, tidying providing me with an excuse to put off work for another five minutes so I can get in two more revolutions. At night, I've warned my children that if they fall off the sofa and start screaming I won't hear them because I've got my Pods in and, for reasons I can't explain but that they may one day understand, I am compelled to listen to Linda Ronstadt over and over and over and over until suddenly, just as abruptly as it started, it stops.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist