SONG: “Hyperfocus”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “Something in The Back of Your Eye Could Reveal Whether You Have ADHD,” Science Alert, 28 April 2025, as used in the post ADHD diagnosed by looking deeply into your eyes..
ABSTRACT: This is one of those songs that I think is just sort of ambiently available, like … it’s the default mode of my thinkin’ parts, just sort of always there, running in the background, the 60-cycle hum of Grant’s brain at work.
Most of the songs I wind up writing here, I’m trying to do something, often something I’ve noticed some other songwriter doing. It’s not plagiarism, I don’t think, because it’s not meant to be an exact copy. It’s not a tribute either, and not usually a pastiche, because it’s not often meant to sound like whatever songwriter either. It’s more back-engineering. How did that mood happen? How did that lyric hit in that particular way? (“In the Years Before A/C” sounds nothing like “Twin-Size Mattress,” which is honestly kind of a better song, but it was consciously created as an attempt to see how that damn song fit together and how to try to pull some of the same emotional tricks.)
To be honest, really, that sort of back-engineering is just as often an attempt to exorcise an earworm – the song hijacks the background hum of the brain, making it hard to focus on anything else, so let’s look and the component parts until the hyperfocus goes away.
All that is to say this song is not one of THOSE songs – it’s just the very close-to-the-surface stuff that comes out when I sit and fiddle without (WITHOUT!) consciously analyzing what sounds like who. I knew a couple days ago at most this month’s song would be about the ADHD look-deeply-into-the-eyes diagnosis, and maybe two days, maybe three days ago sat down with a guitar between one task and another conversation and thought, OK, what would it sound like, and this sort of melancholy open-chord thing of a sort I was playing back in the 1990s came out, super simple, three-chord walkup from Asus4 to some kind of suspended C, which went to a D for a chorus or a bridge.
Stole 15 minutes to make a bassline using a Rhodes piano VST, added a little solo part to that, simple as possible. Played the three-chord loop before bedtime last night, jotted down a lyric over breakfast, and then when the rest of the family left the house to go shopping just before a thunderstorm, spent half and hour, 45 minutes getting three vocal takes (picked the best bits and then added a harmony for the outro) and, what, five or six guitar takes (picked the best three, kept the best of those in the center and panned the other two hard right and left as backing), then added a guitar solo. The rest of it was all fidgeting with drums and taking snare hits away, taking more snare hits away. The drums were maybe the only part that used the analysis-brain.
All of which is a way to say I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD, but like most people of my age who came up as “gifted” kids, I sort of assume I would be if I tried. Hyperfocus is a thing I know, anyway, and a thing other people in my life comment on about me. “Please stop thinking about that. Stop humming that under your breath. Tell me what you want for dinner. Will you be done soon? Are you in there?”
Yes, I am, sort of.
Maybe, hopefully, there can be something romantic about single-mindedness. Maybe it can be flattering to be the target of … what do I call it? An episode? Too medicalized and obsessive. No, a fascination.
This is a song about time stopping when a sudden glimpse triggers a fascination. All the details of the scene are still there, but they’re all sort of set-dressing around the spotlight that is on the one central element. Does she even know I’m alive? (At my age, why am I even asking that question? Because so much of this way of being is so internal — the hyperfocus happens behind the eyes, after all, anatomically as well as psychologically as it turns out — that the question never goes away. The object of one’s fascination, nine times out of 10, just experiences it as: “Huh, that person just went sort of blank for a minute. Did they forget something, or….”)
This is three minutes of an attempt at explaining myself.
LYRICS (75bpm):
Hyperfocus, an intense fixation
You can see it in my eyes
The capillaries in the fundus dilate
They form a map of my desiresCH/BR
I thought I saw you at the supermarket
I thought maybe you thought like me
The cashiers and cans and bags of lemons
A frozen moment in the ice cream and frozen / noveltiesHyperfocus and dissociation,
I left my body in silence, what else is new?
The retina responds to dopamine, look more closely
The retina responds to you, or the thought of you.SOLO
CHHyperfocus
The retina responds to you
Hyperfocus
The retina reponds to you
Hyperfocus
The retina responds….