Singing In My Sleep

Album: Feeling Strangely Fine (1998)
Charted: 39
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Songfacts®:

  • There was a time when a mixtape was an actual tape: a cassette made up of songs someone compiled, often as a gift. In this song, Semisonic lead singer Dan Wilson sings about getting a very special mixtape from a girl, which leads to an obsession with her - so much so that he can hear her singing the songs in his sleep.

    When we asked Wilson if there was a real tape that inspired the song, he replied: "Yeah, there were a couple. Probably three from different people in my life that I had always been very struck by."
  • The video was directed by Chris Applebaum, who also did Semisonic's "Closing Time" video. We see the band wearing T-shirts with different times on them, changing from scene to scene. Those numbers are the song lengths on the Feeling Strangely Fine album. Dan Wilson told us: "The whole idea of the song is about giving someone a compilation cassette. Every song you put on a compilation cassette has a length of minutes and seconds, so those T-shirts were all just references to the obsessive music lover who might even know the lengths of the songs."

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