“Dream Police” by Cheap Trick

"Dream Police" opens Cheap Trick's 1979 album of the same name, and it's Rick Nielsen at his most gleefully paranoid. He wrote it on his own, and described it as a heavy thought, a stray bit of REM sleep grabbed just before waking, crammed into a pop song; underneath the fun, he said, it was about Big Brother watching.

Tom Werman produced it for Epic, and the thing is built like a funhouse: a hammering power-chord riff, Tom Petersson's bass lunging forward, strings sawing away where a lesser band would have parked a synthesizer, and sudden jolts of dissonance cutting through a chorus you can't shake. As a single it climbed to number 26 on the Billboard Hot 100, and Billboard itself called it supercharged power pop.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.