Founded a decade ago as a competition between sad songs known as March Sadness, the tradition of pitting tracks against each other has persisted year on year, mutating in theme, but forever guided by deep music appreciation. Enthusiasts make their argument for a particular song in passionate essays, all in the spirit of friendly combat. Hit Repeat Until I Hate Music: The March Xness Anthology (Spilt/Lip Press, 2026) brings together a selection of essays to showcase the vibes of this enduring contest. With that in mind, I put the following question to a selection of the anthology’s contributors:
When was the first time music made you lose your mind?
Kathleen Rooney
My parents had the original Star Wars motion picture soundtrack LP, not because they are vinyl heads, but because this was the early 1980s and that was the way we listened to everything. That record is the first time I remember wanting to hit repeat until I hated music, as it were. Specifically, I was obsessed with the Cantina Band’s cantina scene song. I could not get enough of its hectic upbeat energy and drove my parents nuts by making them play it for me over and over, because I was only about 4 years old at the time, and not so dextrous at working the turntable. Thanks, Mom and Dad!
Jim Ruland
I’ve told this story many times before, but it’s worth repeating. When I was sixteen years old my mother took my younger brother and I to the Wax Museum in Washington, D.C. to see The Ramones. We’d begged her to take us and were shocked when she relented. She was a nurse who worked the night shift and was always exhausted. The club was small and dark and having no concept of what “General Admission” meant, my brother and I were shocked when we discovered we could walk right up to the edge of the stage, which we did for the opening act. It was 1985 and the opener was more new wave than punk. They have a song called “You Know I’d Love You If You Didn’t Smoke.” The punks in the audience responded by throwing lit cigarettes at the singer. When the Ramones came out on stage someone literally picked me up and threw me across the room to the other side of the pit and that’s where I stayed for the rest of the show while Johnny, Joey and Dee Dee put me on the path I’m on today.
Laura Lorson
The first time music made me lose my mind, I was eight years old and in the middle seat of our Ford Gran Torino station wagon. My parents and I were headed to The Mall of St. Matthews in Louisville, Kentucky for back-to-school clothes shopping. The vinyl seat upholstery had an imprint of tiny raised flowers and pinstripes, which embossed itself into the back of my legs on hot days, which that particular day was. Anyway, in the car, my family generally listened to AM top 40 music, because this was back in the day before the AM band was all talk radio, all the time. The song “The Rubberband Man” by The Spinners came on, and that bassline just absolutely SENT me. I actually asked my dad to turn it up. My father particularly liked Motown and Philadelphia International groups, so he was happy to oblige. I remember after the song was over saying “I want to hear that again,” and my dad engaged with me over what I liked about it. Mom was just kind of bemused, and amused. “I like how it feels…uneven?” and Dad explained the concept of syncopation. We bought the 45 at the mall that afternoon along with my new white shirt and plaid skirt, and I was completely overjoyed about it. I must have listened to that 45 a dozen times in a row that night (thanks for your patience, Mom and Dad), which led to a lifetime of listening to a song I like over and over and over until it’s imprinted indelibly on my brain. All these years later, I still really love the song.
Jennifer Gravley
I loved the REO Speedwagon song “In My Dreams” and recorded it off the radio onto a cassette tape using my boombox. But I spent as much time rewinding it as I did listening to it, as I listened to it repeatedly and exclusively. Then I came up with the idea to keep listening to the radio and record it every time it came on, one radio recording after the other, until I filled up the A side. Then I had the pleasure of listening to it repeatedly without interruption for a while, but when the tape ended, I had to rewind even longer before hearing it again. So I recorded it off the radio for the entirety of the B side also. I was twelve. I was finally diagnosed with OCD approximately four decades later.
James Charlesworth
Point Stadium. Johnstown, PA. Wikipedia tells me the date was June 16, 1989. What two bands as big as Bon Jovi and Skid Row were doing playing at a 17,000-seat city-league baseball field in a worn-down railroad town in the Allegheny Mountains, I can only guess: Someone must have known someone, right? Some personal or family connection? These were not questions I asked myself at the time. I was twelve, and a friend’s parents had bought us tickets.
This was my first concert, and I remember it only in glimpses. I remember the torrential downpour that turned that grass ballfield to a vast pit of mud and rendered the makeshift sound system incapable of producing anything more recognizable than a blaring din of disharmonious sludge. I remember Skid Row’s bad boy front man, Sebastian Bach, irritable on-stage and challenging a rent-a-cop to a fight in the parking lot after the show. I remember my friend Billy and me in the night’s final encore standing in the outfield grass shouting along to “I’ll Be There For You.” And I remember waking up the following morning—June 17, 1989: a Saturday, the internet tells me—thinking it was all a dream… Until I turned on MTV News to discover that Sebastian Bach had checked himself out of a Johnstown-area hospital. That the rent-a-cop had won the fight and it was all true. The rain and the mud and the power of music to make us lose our minds, to make us shout along oblivious in the cold drenching downpour: it was all true.
Laura Owen
I lose my mind a little bit every time I encounter music I love, or even like a little. Doesn’t everyone? It’s baked into the way we talk about it—I can’t get it out of my head. Have you heard…? You have to listen to… People get very violent about music, whether they love it or hate. I can’t STAND that song someone will unexpectedly announce, just as your jam comes on. I hate musician X! unexpectedly says the mild-mannered acquaintance at a party: do you fight them or swallow your life-long fandom down your throat? I’ve seen my very kind and enjoyer-of-the-little-things-in-life-type husband become extremely angry over about three things, ever, one of them being the band Kings of Leon (he hates them). Fair enough, I guess? Sure!
It’s not like music taps into our measured selves, or most rational way of being. There’s a long string of mythology, religion, and fear-mongering about people gone ecstatic or violent or uncontrollably horny to music, so maybe we can let it go when someone gets a bit snippy over that artist they love/hate. I’ve long ago given up on the idea that I’ll ever love music in some kind of nuanced, curated way that’s comfortable to talk about at parties. I’ll be over here with that one song I’ve recently found that’s made me lose my mind, listening to it over and over and over again in a way that might look superficially like compulsion or obsession, a mode that teeters perilously between love and hate as I grow sick of that song and can never listen to it again, but that’s just what music does to people, hence all the religious music and cults and intense fandoms and such: it lets us unhinge our brains a bit, gives our emotions some temporary open space.