Song of the Moment CXX: Foo Fighters’ “Child Actor”

Since May 25, the number of times I’ve listened to my new Foo Fighters song, “Child Actor” (a song I wrote a love letter to just last April 29), has increased on a ridiculous level.

Foo Fighters performs “Child Actor” at SNL UK.

Here are my “Child Actor” Last.fm statistics (as of June 1, 2026):

StatisticValue
May 25 – June 1, 20261,832 times
Since April 24, 20262,554 times
Listen ranking3th all-time

Last.fm has been logging (scrobbling, rather) the songs I listened to since January 16, 2010, from all-time favorites to haunting reminders, to new discoveries that turned into gems or left with cobwebs. The scrobbling passed by six Foo Fighters eras from Wasting Light (2012) to the most recent, Your Favorite Toy. It took my third-favorite Foos’ song, “Walk” (from the aforementioned Wasting Light), 15 years to reach 1,388 listens. “Child Actor”, a song from Your Favorite Toy, took only five weeks and three days to reach 2,554 listens. I even find that ridiculous as I type that.

But there’s a new reason for the drastic spike in listens. As I’ve written in my love letter to “Child Actor”, when I listened to it almost all day for the first time, I also went through another harrowing time when I felt ignored, and the song achingly speaks my desire to be seen and understood. And then last Monday, I went from being at my most vulnerable, hopeful, heartbroken, hopeless, overwhelmed, panicked, and physically distressed in a span of hours. Now I’ve been treating “Child Actor” as my personal soundtrack again since that fateful day.

Despite starting to take better physical care of myself again, I felt mechanical and robotic doing them, while my heart never recovered. Not only do I label “Child Actor” my Song of the Moment, but it’s also the only song I’m listening to from now on. And the heartbreaking part about my decision to constantly listen to the approval-seeking track from my favorite band is this: even if I reach a million listens, even if I keep hearing “Turn the camera off” 46 times per listen, unless there’s a way to mend the source of this mess, I don’t think I’m healing from this.

The statistic changes; the situation stays the same.


Header image: Houses Cheung of Pexels. Edited in Adobe Photoshop 2026.

Published by

Unknown's avatar

The Deranged Writer

Yes, I wear a mask sometimes. You can call me Dewey. Absolutely deranged, below-average writer.

Mark Your Words