i've always been somebody who is perpetually tormented by having a song stuck in their head, usually an embarrassing one, but having one you're working on stuck in your head is vastly worse. it's like oh, okay, i can't solve this, but it's just gonna hang there *wrong*. thanks.

@h_thoreson iirc there's a passage in an old Nick Hornby novel where he posits that pop songs are puzzles that you want to listen to intensively until your brain 'solves' them -- at which point they can just go into the rotation -- which seems to track well with what you describe, but from the listener's perspective.