[Dr. Jacoby]

Years ago, I picked up Francis Lai’s Live for Life but then unloaded it in a record purge. Overall, it just didn’t really engage me.

But afterward, the track “Zoom” kept haunting me. It would appear as an earworm at the most inopportune times, as if mocking me for my stupidity. So I repurchased the album a few years later, to break the spell, just for that one track.

I also have Andre Previn’s Rollerball for his two originals, “Executive Party” and “Executive Party Dance.” Apparently, Previn couldn’t be bothered to write any more music for the film other than those two brilliant tracks, so they padded out the album with orchestral muzak by such has-beens as Bach, Tchaikovsky, and Shostakovich.

These days, if an album has only one good track, I’m much more likely to buy a lossless download of the track from Qobuz, rather than to add more clutter to the shelves.