Day 10 – A Song That Puts You To Sleep
Revolver – The Beatles
I know this isn’t a song, but the album always will be linked with sleep for me. As a teenager I had mostly vinyl albums, but a few cassettes. I couldn’t listen to albums as I went to sleep, and I didn’t want ot have the radio playing all night, especially with disc jockey chatter. I opted to listen to one of my cassettes as I fell asleep.
Throughout my life I have gone through phases where I listen to almost nothing but The Beatles. When I was 17, I was going through such a period. Unfortunately, I had two cassettes of the band, Revolver and the Yellow Submarine soundtrack. As I lay down after turning off the lights, I’d start up my portable cassette and listen to Revolver as I drifted off to sleep.
As the years went by and I got more music, migrated to CDs, etc., I would listen to a wider variety of music as I went to sleep. I still to fall asleep to music, but my wife doesn’t, so it’s been a long time since I’ve done so. Even then, Revolver was one of the first CDs I purchased, and one of the few on that format I had from the band for the longest time – until the box sets came out, as I to listen to the vinyl.
Revolver is perhaps my least Beatles album, though there are certainly great songs on there. Heck, taken individually, I’d stack almost every track on that album up against almost every other song in The Beatles catalog. As an album, however, I find Revolver boring, due in no small part to the fact that for so long I used it to help me fall asleep, I’m sure I’ve conditioned myself tosort of “check out” from the world around me. After getting The Beatles box sets (both mono and stereo) I would find myself yawning. Interestingly, it was the American version of the album I had been to for all these years, which omitted the song “I’m Only Sleeping” – at least until it was released on CD in the late 80s.