The Daily Epic Earworm For November 28, 2025
Everyone gets songs stuck in their heads that just won’t go away. They sneak into your subconscious. They are epic earworms that you find yourself humming uncontrollably, singing in the shower, or tapping the beat to with your foot or ballpoint pen when you should be working. Sometimes they even keep you awake at night. Whether they are current hits, one-hit wonders, movie soundtrack gems, holiday favorites, or songs from your youth, their catchy vocals, riffs, hooks, and choruses seem to linger for days.
Here, those songs find a home, no matter the genre. Here, those epic earworms are revisited, explained, and celebrated. Here, you may find the song that haunts you tomorrow. Here is today’s unescapable song of the day…and the story behind it.
Today’s Epic Earworm: Bonnie Tyler — “Total Eclipse of the Heart”
Welsh pop-rock singer Bonnie Tyler experienced a taste of global success with her 1977 hit “It’s a Heartache,” but struggled to recreate the magic for years. After three albums and a movie soundtrack entry all failed to bring her incredible, raspy voice back into the spotlight, she turned to frequent Meat Loaf collaborator Jim Steinman. Steinman would eventually sign on to produce her next album.
The album, Faster Than the Speed of Night, would contain six re-worked cover songs and three new songs, two of which were written by Steinman. One of those songs was “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” That single would be the tour de force that Tyler was searching for. It topped the charts in eight countries, including the United States, in 1983 and ended up selling over six million copies worldwide. The song also garnered Tyler multiple Grammy and American Music Award nominations.
Behind the Music
There are a lot of crazy, unrelated stories behind “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” First, the song earned Steinman a Number One single in the U.S., but it also cost him one. Tyler’s run at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 held Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing at All,” another Steinman-penned song, out of the top spot. Ironically, Tyler would later cover the Air Supply hit in 1995.
Here’s another interesting fact about “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Sales and streams of the epic earworm spike every time there is an eclipse. The song actually topped the iTunes chart during eclipses in 2017 and 2024. It has climbed back onto Billboard charts in the U.S. and pop charts in other countries during eclipses, as well.
Perhaps the craziest fact about the Tyler classic, though, is that Steinman admits the song is actually a vampire love song. That’s right, his original title for the tune was “Vampires in Love,” and he wrote it while he was working on a musical of the vampire classic Nosferatu. Steinman later included the song in his 1997 musical “Dance of the Vampires.”
Just hearing the song on the radio, the vampire motif doesn’t really shine through. The Russell Mulcahy-directed video for the song (above) doesn’t necessarily help the vampire narrative either. It is a weird fever dream filled with ninjas, fencers, a swim team, angels, and a glowing-eyed choir that was filmed at a large Victorian Gothic-style sanatorium in England. The glowing eyes effect was used in some early vampire movies, but the plot of the video just never seems like a vampire story. Occult or not, the video has been streamed over a billion times on YouTube, and the song was Tyler‘s biggest hit.
