The Neverhood — Complete Claymation Game Soundtrack

Doug TenNapel built The Neverhood out of roughly three tons of clay in 1996, stop-motion animating an entire point-and-click adventure frame by frame for DreamWorks Interactive. Terry Scott Taylor, until then known for the band Daniel Amos, wrote the music and released it separately as Imaginarium. It sounds like a jug band recorded in a shed: banjo, harmonica, upright bass, kazoo, and Taylor scatting nonsense over most of it.

The game had a strange second life on pirated CDs across the former USSR, which is why more people in Moscow can hum this than in California. It is worth being honest about what it is — vocals, sudden tempo jumps, comic timing built to punctuate animation. Nothing here disappears into the background the way a piano loop does. I put it on when work is boring rather than hard, and it does a good job of making a spreadsheet feel less grim.