If cult actor and sometime country musician Jeff Bridges’ new album, Sleeping Tapes, is aimed at anyone, it is people like me. I have, on numerous occasions when Radio 3 is getting a bit severe, typed into YouTube “drowsy music drones” or “guaranteed to make you sleep” in a desperate quest to silence my chattering mind. I’ve even dipped my toe in the world of autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), hours of videos, all with millions of views, of people softly speaking at you about a massage they’re going to give, or ordering you a hotel room.
Bridges’ record is sort of ASMR-plus and claims to draw on his years of practising meditation and studying zen philosophy. It’s also basically a massive advert for the website-designing platform Squarespace, which you might know because it sometimes appears to sponsors every podcast ever made, to show off how even a big old hippy such as Jeff Bridges can build own website.
So for the past few nights, I’ve put on a novelty T-shirt and my night shorts, climbed in to bed and let the Dude soothe me to sleep.
The first thing I notice in my dopey state is how quickly I come to accept that the ambient noises Bridges has recorded – of flowing streams and whistling wind – are, in fact, outside my window. The most soothing sounds come from Bridges himself, his grunts and whistles sound like a storm brewing or an acorn skimming a lake. I picture him laying in the soil, moss growing over his beard, with a microphone hanging down from a branch. As I said, I’m a sucker for this kind of thing.
There are some astonishingly lovely moments. A bedtime story about a tenor saxophone player who uses Play-Doh to keep his fingers limber. Bridges talking to some children about how, when his daughter was younger, he agreed to meet her by a special tree in both their dreams.
On one track, Feeling Good, he just says nice things about you: “I like your haircut, you order well at restaurants, you have excellent insights about popular movies, you’re very good at guessing when a traffic light will turn green.” Cheers, Jeff.
It should all be a bit of a gimmick, but it works rather well; I’ll doze in and out initially, feeling upbeat and sleepy. Often, I wake up for a few tracks only to fall back asleep, but in three attempts I’ve never made it to the end of album.
The problem, though, is that, when I sleep, Bridges sticks around. He becomes the narrator of my dreams, passing comment as I go about my imaginative business. One night, after I’d gone out drinking in real life, I felt thirsty in my dream, and Bridges was there extolling the virtues of drinking water, just as he does on the tapes. I woke up and went to the tap, feeling both quenched and as if a Hollywood actor had rewired my subconscious.
Basically, it helps you get to sleep, but it plays with your dreamlike state so much that your concept of reality quickly degenerates. I’m almost certain that, one night, while wearing my night shorts, I will meet Bridges by that tree, and we can both lie in the soil.
