“Daysleeper” by R.E.M.

"Daysleeper" led R.E.M. into Up, their eleventh album, arriving as its first single in October 1998. The spark was almost comically small: Michael Stipe was in New York working on a book of haiku with friends when he walked down a stairwell one afternoon and passed an apartment door with a sign reading "daysleeper", and he tiptoed the rest of the way down thinking about whoever was trying to rest behind it.

Out of that he built a portrait of a night-shift worker trading messages with colleagues, a body clock flipped upside down until the hours blur and the self starts to slip away. It's written by Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills, produced by Pat McCarthy with the band and mixed by Nigel Godrich, and it plays the despair gently, which only makes it sting harder.

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