“When You Sleep” by My Bloody Valentine

"When You Sleep" was the first song let out of Loveless, My Bloody Valentine's 1991 album on Creation, sent out ahead of the pack as a promotional single. It also shows how slowly that record got made: Kevin Shields later told Select that the drums went down in September '89, the guitar that December and the bass the following April, and then the thing sat for about a year with no words, no vocals and no title, just a number: "Song 12". The melody and vocals only came in 1991.

Those vocals are the giveaway. After 12 or 13 takes, Shields gave up hunting for the right one and piled them all in, so the voices, credited to Shields and Bilinda Butcher, smear into one sweet, sleepy blur. He wrote, produced and mixed it, with Butcher also on guitar, Debbie Googe on bass and Colm Ó Cíosóig on drums.

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