I assume this happens to everyone. A tune gets into your brain and it doesn’t come out. Maybe for a week. A month even.

(Random thought: Does this phenomena apply to tone-deaf people, too? Imagine how difficult it would be to hum the same tuneless song for weeks … but if you’re tone deaf you wouldn’t know it was tuneless, I guess.)

My brain is a revolving turntable of bizarre and unpredictable music. Like yours probably is, too. I distinctly recall spending the entirety of the 1988 Olympics at Seoul, about three weeks, humming the melancholy “My Life” by the Beatles. (“There are places I remember …”)

The latest tune lodged in my head is just weird. But I suppose I can explain it.

It is the French marching song entitled “Le Regiment de Sambre et Meuse.”

If you followed the wiki link, above, you found a page that includes a button for playing the song, an old recording made by fairly famous French singer. I love the scratchiness of it. Gives it that feel of verite.

It was written 140 years ago, after the Franco-Prussian War, which did not go well for France. Perhaps the army needed pepping up.

The idea of marching songs is just that … something to help soldiers march. It needs a steady beat, perhaps a bit fast, to push along the infantry. Some European armies once had recruits sing while marching, to help get them into fighting trim. Perhaps they still do it.

I didn’t bump into this song while in France. I became familiar with it because it is the tune played by the Ohio State marching band as they perform their famous “script Ohio” routine. The one that ends with a tuba player “dotting the I.”

How Ohio State got on to “Sambre et Meuse” (and those are the names of two rivers, in France) … I don’t know. But it’s a catchy little thing, isn’t it?

I was walking home from the newspaper, around midnight, a couple of weeks ago, and I try to move along quickly. It’s about a 20-minute walk, and the rhythm of striding … all of a sudden “Sambre et Meuse” was in my head.

I was happy for it, at the moment. Seemed to make the walk more fun. The next day I’m sure I played the Ohio State band video again.

Then Sambre et Meuse began to overstay its welcome. I’ve had it stuck on “replay” for weeks.

On another I was walking home, I tried to replace it with “Wacht am Rhein” … which is a German marching song perhaps best known in the States as the song the German officers are singing while at the piano during the movie “Casablanca.” That worked for a while, and then I was back to Sambre et Meuse.

My latest hope for subbing out the French song is James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” … which was, apparently, insinuated into my brain when I saw Taylor on Mr Sunshine this week. So I went to youtube and played it, finding the cover by the group Blood, Sweat and Tears. I like their version better.

My subconscious, then, is the scene of a battle between these two dual concepts — Sambre et Meuse and Fire and Rain.

Within an hour or so, I should know which has won this skirmish. What I know, as a certainty, is that I will be really tired of either song in a couple of days. Maybe even by tonight.