“My Brain is Like a Sieve” by Thomas Dolby

"My Brain Is Like a Sieve" sits on Aliens Ate My Buick, Thomas Dolby's 1988 album, and EMI USA sent it out the following summer as the record's third and last single. Dolby wrote it and produced it with Bill Bottrell, and it finds the Englishman trying reggae on for size for the first time. He has talked about triplet echoes being part and parcel of that upbeat reggae bounce, and he built the track on a mix of sequenced and live drums.

Beneath the skank there's a sore heart. Dolby has said it's about an ex-girlfriend in Sheffield, and the song belongs to a man so stung by a past lover that he'd happily forget the whole thing ever happened. The cheekiest touch is a sampled cry of "murder" from the American actor Ed Asner, Dolby's idea of an old-school cop-show voice standing in for the toaster's yelp.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.