I’m a bad sleeper. I’ve been a bad sleeper for years. That’s actually an official diagnosis. Back in the mid-nineties, my problems were so pronounced that I sought out a sleep disorder specialist, went to several appointments with her, wore a bizarre contraption on my noggin one night so she could get data on what my sleep patterns were like. In the end, she said there was nothing wrong with me that was nameable or treatable. She shrugged her shoulders and said, “Some people are just bad sleepers.”

At the time, I was compounding my difficulties by working fifty to sixty hours a week at three or four different jobs, including wildly different hours depending on the day. During the week I spent most days a standard nine-to-five sort of job, and then worked overnights on the weekends, hardly an approach conducive to building a dependable sleep schedule. Even once I rectified that, though, my sleep improved only marginally. Cutting out caffeine didn't help. Nor did rigidly adhering to a set bedtime or arranging the bedroom in just the right way. Every technique suggested to me over the years has been tried to no avail. It's just part of me, whether I like it or not, like a birthmark.

One side effect is that I'm a little more curious about songs about sleep, or the lack thereof. So when Mojo, at the height of my devotion to it, profiled a new singer named Bic Runga, giving particular praise to her single “Get Some Sleep,” I instinctively sought it out. I can’t relay much about the singer, or type out testimonials about the vibrancy of the song. I can only note that on a night like last night, when I awake at 3:00 a.m. and a return to slumber is clearly out of my capability, this is the song that goes through my head as it lies fruitlessly on my pillow.

I’m going to be very tired today.

Bic Runga, “Get Some Sleep” (Removed by request.)

(Disclaimer: The album this song originally appears on seems to be out of print, but I’ll concede that I didn’t do especially rigorous detective work this week. You can buy this song and others from the album in digital form, but we again operate under The Quirk Rule, which maintains that those moneys don’t get back to the performers, songwriters or producers anyway. Still, if anyone with due authority to do so asks me to remove this song and this file from the Interweb, I will gladly and promptly comply.)