Look, I need to talk about something and I need you to hear me out before you start humming that creepy piano riff and making demon possession jokes.

Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield is not horror movie music. I mean, yes, technically a tiny piece of the opening was used in The Exorcist in 1973 and it became one of the most recognizable horror cues of all time. I get it. But reducing this album to “that scary movie song” is like calling the Mona Lisa “that painting from the Da Vinci Code.” You’re not wrong but you’re missing the entire point.

A Brief History of a Teenager Making Everyone Look Bad

Here’s the thing that still blows my mind. Mike Oldfield was nineteen years old when he recorded Tubular Bells. Nineteen. When I was nineteen I was figuring out how to not drown at commercial diving school and calling Sarah from a payphone. This kid walked into a studio and played over twenty different instruments — guitars, keyboards, percussion, bass, the titular tubular bells — and layered them all together into a nearly fifty-minute composition split across two sides of a vinyl record.

It was 1973. Richard Branson had just started a little record label called Virgin Records and needed something to release. Oldfield’s demo was the thing that caught his ear, and Tubular Bells became Virgin’s very first release. The album that launched Richard Branson’s empire wasn’t a pop single or a rock anthem. It was a teenager’s sprawling, instrumental, progressive fever dream. And it worked. It sold millions of copies worldwide and basically funded everything Virgin did after that.

Then The Exorcist happened. Director William Friedkin heard the opening few minutes — that hypnotic, repeating piano figure — and threw it into his movie. And suddenly the most creative instrumental album of the decade became “the scary music.” Oldfield has talked about how frustrating that association was for years, and honestly, I get it.

Side One on Repeat: A Productivity Hack I Didn’t Expect

So here’s why I’m actually writing this post. I’ve been putting Side One of Tubular Bells on repeat while I work, and it has turned me into an unstoppable productivity machine. Or at least a stoppable one that stops less often.

Side One is about twenty-five minutes of continuous music. It doesn’t have lyrics. It doesn’t have choruses that get stuck in your head and pull you out of whatever you’re doing. It builds and shifts and layers instruments on top of each other in a way that gives your brain just enough to chew on without demanding your full attention. It’s like the perfect amount of background complexity.

For someone with ADHD, finding the right focus music is basically a quest on par with finding the Holy Grail. Too quiet and my brain starts inventing things to think about. Too loud or too lyrical and I’m singing along instead of working. Tubular Bells hits this sweet spot where it occupies the part of my brain that wants to wander off and think about whether cats understand mirrors, while leaving the rest of me free to actually get things done.

And because it’s one continuous piece that flows and evolves over twenty-five minutes, there are no track breaks to jolt you out of the zone. No pause between songs where your brain goes “oh we stopped, let me check my phone real quick.” It just keeps going. And when it ends and loops back to that opening piano riff, it’s like a gentle reset rather than a disruption. You barely notice it happened.

I’ve tried lo-fi beats. I’ve tried “focus playlists” on Spotify. I’ve tried video game soundtracks and movie scores and rain sounds and brown noise and literally everything the internet has ever suggested. A prog rock album from 1973 made by a teenager is what finally cracked the code for me. The universe has a sense of humor.

Just Listen to It

If you’ve never actually sat down and listened to Tubular Bells — the whole thing, not just the first thirty seconds you recognize from a horror movie — do yourself a favor. Put on Side One. Put on headphones. Do some work. Let it wash over you. It’s not scary. It’s not even close to scary. It’s beautiful and weird and layered and exactly the kind of organized chaos that makes a brain like mine shut up and focus.

Mike Oldfield made something genuinely remarkable when he was barely old enough to vote, and fifty-plus years later it’s helping me answer emails faster. I think he’d appreciate that more than the demon thing.

Stay focused, listen to weird old albums, and stay safe.