“Punk as Fuck” – The American Analog Set
(Words/music: American Analog Set, available on Know by Heart, Tiger Style 2001)

About a year ago, I made the choice to stop watching TV in bed.  I had heard from a variety of sources (none of which I’m going to look up now, so feel free to challenge me) that watching TV right before bed (which, aside from having it on in the morning, is when I generally watched TV) affected the quality of sleep.  Being someone who rarely approaches the recommended level of sleep during the week, I want to make sure that the six hours of sleep I get a night are good ones.  However, I find that many nights if I get into bed and I’m not exhausted that my mind wanders.  Sometimes (Sunday night in particular), my mind gets to the list of things that I need to do, or worse – the list of things I haven’t done yet – and then I’m wide awake in bed.  So when I turned off the TV (and I’ll still watch some occasionally, but generally only the nights that I go to bed “early”) I started to put on music to help me transition from wide awake to sleeping soundly.  I tend to gravitate towards music with lots of held notes and minimal lyrics – when I’m in bed, I want something instrumental (Japancakes interpretation of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless gets a lot of plays before bed) or with lyrics that are obscured or unintelligible (Sigur Ros currently fills many of my top played tracks on Last.fm for this reason) so that I don’t start to think about words.  I have maybe a half dozen different albums that I listen to in these late hours and I’m open to suggestions if you have any.

The oddest album that I’ll listen to at night is the American Analog Set’s Know by Heart.  It’s not as dream-like or lushly arranged as some of the other albums I like to fall asleep to, but I find it fills this role the same way.  The sonically ironic “Punk as Fuck” outlines many of these reasons I find it relaxing.  It has a mellow sound, specifically from the relaxed-sounding keyboards and the light percussion (both of which continue throughout the album).   While Andrew Kenny sings clearly (and in English) with words worth paying attention to, he has an extremely calming voice that sends the words to my subconscious mind.  I don’t always remember my dreams (or, more likely, forget them very quickly as soon as I wake up and start running through the list of things to accomplish that day), but it would be interesting to see how Know by Heart affects my dreams compared with some of the other records.  It’s not a record that lulls me to sleep; instead, it helps me take my mind off of my schedule long enough to ease into slumber.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go close my windows, turn off the light, and put on Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.

More on The American Analog Set: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm