Songs About Sleep: The 15 Best of All Time
- Posted on April 27, 2019
- Articles
- By Neil Hedley
5. In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning - Carly Simon
Lyricist Bob Hilliard was born in 1918, and started working in New York City's Tin Pan Alley straight out of high school, at a time when music was almost looked upon as a tangible product that could be mass-produced in a factory. He first entered the consciousness of Frank Sinatra in the middle 1940s with a song he'd written simply called "The Coffee Song" - a classic to true Sinatra fans. So it's no surprise that Sinatra chose this one, written by Hilliard with composer David Mann, as the title track for his 1955 album, In The Wee Small Hours. Since then, it's been covered dozens of times, perhaps most notably as part of the soundtrack to the 1993 Tom Hanks / Meg Ryan film, Sleepless In Seattle with a cover by Carly Simon.
Here's Carly performing the song live for an HBO special, with footage from Sleepless edited in:
4. Wake Up, Little Susie - The Everly Brothers
This song was banned from certain radio stations, according to Don Everly, because by 1957 standards, the lyrics were too suggestive for airplay. (Think about that next time you hear "Blurred Lines".) It's a song about a teenage date gone wrong, but not for the reasons we've become accustomed to in the Pop songs of the modern era. Nope, in this one our two love birds fell asleep watching a movie, and were left to deal with what everyone else would assume happened.
It was a #1 hit pretty much everywhere that had a music chart.
3. Dream Weaver - Gary Wright
In the 1970 song "God" from his first post-Beatles solo album, John Lennon declared that he was no longer the Dreamweaver that he was when he was a Beatle, he was just John. That was the first popular reference to the term "dreamweaver", but it was far from the last. In 1975, Gary Wright turned it into a Gold record and a #1 hit; a song so identified with Gary Wright that it became his nickname. It also doesn't hurt that it was forever immortalized as something of a love theme in the movie Wayne's World.
2. Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel) - Billy Joel
Talking about this song - even all these years later - can still sometimes get Billy Joel choked up. It was written in response to a question from his young daughter, Alexa Ray, asking what would happen when he died. And the question came at a time when Billy was in the middle of a split with Alexa Ray's Mom, Christie Brinkley, so as Billy says, "This was like a double-pronged thing about 'Daddy, you're gonna leave me,' and I said, 'I will never leave you.'"
On Fathers' Day 2015, Alexa Ray posted the following on Instagram as part of a much longer tribute to her Dad:
You promised you would never leave me; and in turn, the unwavering union between a daughter and her father goes both ways... and the depth of its' dwellings knows no bounds. So, Dearest Dad, you should always know: Wherever you may go, no matter where you are, I never will be far away.>
