“Which came first, the music or the misery?” Rob (John Cusack) asks in Hi Fidelity. I saw the movie, and the read the book, at a too impressionable age. The question has haunted me for over twenty years. Do I, because I? Or because I, do I?
I was a teenager in the late ‘90s. My prized possession was a portable black boom box that played CDs, cassettes, and radio. I stayed up late, listening to music, often while crying. Sometimes I cried about the people on whom I had crushes, sometimes because of trig homework, and sometimes because my dad was dying. It was a fun time to be awake!
These three songs have been a soundtrack for my life, and perhaps a base layer for my insomnia or mental illness.
I got my feet on the ground and I don’t go to sleep to dream.
“Sleep to Dream,” Fiona Apple
This was my first time considering sleep as something utilitarian, something to endure. This was the same era of Ralph Wiggum, “Sleep?! That’s where I’m a viking!” I sleep because I have to, that’s all.
I won’t go, I won’t sleep
I can’t breathe, until you’re resting here with me
“Here with Me,” Dido
This song struck to the heart of my teenage-ness. How I pined, how I longed. Was it self-fulfilling prophecy, I wondered later: I did find great comfort in sharing a bed with others. For a brief time, in college, I was actually able to sleep if someone else was there. Dreaming feels like I’m leaving for some strange broken-down city, and that other person was a tether.
You come out at night
That’s when the energy comesYou woke up screaming aloud
A prayer from your secret God
”Building a Mystery,” Sarah McLachlan
In this first place, this song just slaps. This song haunts me because it was everywhere:
Commercially, “Building a Mystery” was Canada’s most successful single of 1997, topping the RPM 100 Hit Tracks chart for eight weeks, and peaked at number 13 in the United States. “Building a Mystery” won the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance at the 40th Grammy Awards as well as the Juno Award for Single of the Year in 1998.
Listening to the song, I would imagine Buffy and Angel. (I mean, literally the next line after “the energy comes” is “the dark side’s light/and the vampires roam.”) Even now, I often use that pop culture lens to enjoy a different piece of pop culture. It’s funny to think about my teenage self doing it, but using these layers became a problem as I aged, something I had to work out in therapy.
Eventually, I was able to listen to the song authentically. The lyrics are about me. Not me pining for someone, or taken a line out of context, but my own essence, an essence deserving of being the “star.” In “Sleep to Dream” and “Here With Me,” I identify with the singer, feeling the pang of a broken heart. “Building a Mystery” is about me, is to me.
The irony, of course, is that “Building a Mystery” is about hiding one’s true self. Oh haha, I’m a night owl, I don’t sleep much, I went to bed at 3 AM, isn’t that funny? Don’t mind me as I wake up, screaming aloud.
Bad Sleeper 
Leave a comment