WRMC 91.1 FM On Rotation

Author: BENJAMIN GOLZE

I feel horrible. The only thing keeping me awake right now is a cup of coffee I had with lunch. I have that awful feeling of being held above the brink of sweet, sweet sleep by a necessary chemical high. This is because I just arrived back at school from a red-eye flight from San Francisco. Of course I could have planned ahead and written this any number of times over break, but that would have seriously impeded my schedule of watching the first season of "Lost." Plus, the mediocre writing that commonly fills this space needs some sort of inspiration, the sort of inspiration that I couldn't get from dreary Bay Area weather and sleeping in.

I did, however, receive said inspiration in the moments before passing out shortly after the plane took off last night/early this morning. As with most times when I try to sleep on a plane, train, or automobile, I slipped on my headphones and queued up some of my favorite sleeping music. Then it hit me: Hey, I'll write about my sleepy music. There are a number of artists that I can always fall back on in these situations, and I even have a "Sleepy" playlist that I generally put on before going to bed. Then I fell asleep. I don't even know if I got past the first song.

That is not to say that the music to which I fall asleep is boring. It just has that feel that's relaxing, like one of those sleep machines that plays a babbling brook, croaking frogs, or recordings of bowling tournaments. Take the band I used last night, for example. The Album Leaf play a very soothing, synth and guitar-heavy instrumental rock. I think they have a couple of albums out, but the opener to "One Day I'll Be on Time" will knock even a heavyweight out cold. The song, called "Gust of..." features simple guitar lines plucking their way over a single bass note. It's perfectly titled, sounding like a gust of something, wind probably, but by the time you get to that thought you're in a vegetative state.

Most of the best sleepy music tends to be instrumental. My personal favorite is an album by Explosions in the Sky, a Texas instrumental rock group that is well known for their explosive live shows, no pun intended. And most of their albums are too, especially their early ones, which infuse heavy-metal sensibilities into long, sprawling instrumentals. The original soundtrack to the film "Friday Nigh Lights," written almost exclusively by Explosions in the Sky, takes a much different tack. The film is set in Odessa, in the flat expanses of western Texas, and the barren songs from the film evoke the emptiness of that landscape with single, suspended guitar parts. A shorter version of their song "Your Hand in Mind" appears with added strings, and is as sweet as it is soothing. This album became my sleeping music to drown out the racket on the trains and buses in China.

But not all sleepy music needs to be instrumental. The only requirement is the voice needs to be as soft as the music. Nobody's going to fall asleep to Isaac Brock's (of Modest Mouse) voice. My personal favorite in this category is Iron & Wine's first album "The Creek Drank the Cradle." The simple, sweet folk music is perfect for sitting out on the porch on a summer afternoon, and if you turn it up real, real loud, it will drown out the annoying ladies chatting next you with blowing out your eardrums. His cover of the Postal Service's "Such Great Heights" is another perfect example of vocals that will carry you off to dream land.

Interestingly, many of these sleepy songs also do fairly well at making the chicks swoon, or so I hear. Let's say, hypothetically, that I had a "romantic" playlist. I'd probably stick most of these songs there too. Particularly the aforementioned "Your Hand in Mind," or, say, Clapton's "Wonderful Tonight." The implications of this are deep, and beyond simple exposition in a music column. And so I challenge you, faithful reader, to ponder this topic yourself, the next time you drift off to sleep on a long flight, listening to your iPod.