#69. SAFIA - Counting Sheep (#35, 2015)
14th of 2015
I live with some kind of undiagnosed sleep disorder. If you've managed to avoid this affliction, thank your lucky stars and appreciate every night that goes by without a stir. The simple version of this is that I just struggle to get to sleep a lot of the time. Sometimes my mind is wandering for this, other times it isn't. All I know is that it's likely a gamble that I'll feel like I got a satisfying sleep that'll suffice for my energy for the next day. It's been like this for basically all of my life. I remember being very young and asking my grandfather how he manages to do it, and I felt a little let down that his trick didn't seem to work for me. The weirdest thing about it is something I've discovered in my adult years, which is that my sleep tends to follow a very specific pattern. I'll go to bed, and after any amount of time (I want to say it's usually 20-30 minutes) I'll have an extremely vivid dream that lasts about 5 minutes. I'll wake up after that, and then at a point in time I can't recall, get to sleep properly but I'll wake up every couple of hours often certain it's been eight hours when I look at the time and find that it's only been two. I'll feel pretty tired through all of this until eventually I reach a point where I'm pretty confident I can't get back to sleep and I'll know I have to get out of bed.
It is possible that I have some variety of narcolepsy. The most telling symptom I've had described is that I can often take a short nap and will almost certainly have vivid dreams from it. It's so expected that it does seep into my unconsciousness and the dreams will often be lucid (though other times they are so wildly out of step with reality and I believe every moment of it until an hour after I woke up). I'm told this is the brain catching up on some of the missing REM sleep during the night. Back in 2019, I had a sleep study to try and get some closure, where they'd hook a bunch of things up to me overnight and study whatever happened. The only problem is that I didn't get enough sleep that night to conclude anything (I'll admit it's a little harder to get to sleep as it's a bit uncomfortable/foreign), so I remain in the dark about this. Perhaps I'll try it another time but my night owl schedule is difficult to work around, except oddly when I've travelled to different time zones and found myself going to bed much earlier, jet lagging in the wrong direction for whatever reason. Outside of the trying to sleep portion, it's the general fatigue that gets to me the worst. I can be so tired all day and struggling to stay awake when I'm watching a movie or reading a book. It makes me think back to my schooling days where I'd often plant my head down and close my eyes. I didn't think I'd ever fallen asleep in public before, but looking back on it, it matches more recent experiences when I've completely zoned out, and I just continue to feel so bad for my younger self who didn't remotely have the resources or context to clarify some things that were really starting to ruin my life. You can probably track the end result on my report cards where I went from a near-straight A student to barely passing two of my five Year 12 subjects. So much of it all comes down to the fact that I just cannot get enough sleep to save my life.
Anyway these are just the things that come to mind when SAFIA come up with a song called "Counting Sheep". It's said to be a song about insomnia though I can't find that quote from the band itself. The only thing they've said is that it's the evil sibling of the other SAFIA song that will eventually appear on this list. The only useful evidence you really get for this is the song's chorus that says 'never ending' and 'never get no sleep'. It definitely feels like it's more to do with a general Halloween theme (ignore that they released it in March). The middle section of the song has a bunch of movie references. Some appear to be directly lifted audio but the Casablanca quote is wrong enough that they must have done it themselves. The other quotes are from Peeping Tom, Misery & Nightmare on Elm Street, all movies I've seen since this song came out except for Peeping Tom but I'll see if I can't make that happen before this goes live (I did, it was interesting). There's a cameo in the video during this part by Keli Holiday.
The message clearly got across though because the song has seemingly caught a second wave of popularity years after the fact, as someone made a Five Nights at Freddy's video for the song that actually has more YouTube views than the real music video does. I have never played any of those games because I suspect the general gameplay loop doesn't appeal to me (it feels like a clear case of a game made for streamers, more than anything), and I've no heightened views of the franchise after watching the first movie. I'm probably just 5-10 years too old for it though. Nice for SAFIA to get some kickback from it though.
I really enjoy this one. It's still very early in the days of SAFIA and they only had a small handful of songs at this point. This one felt like a step into greater popularity for them though. It managed to spend 9 weeks on the ARIA Chart and get as high as #55, making it unquestionably their most commercially successful song until "Make Them Wheels Roll" (#532) did a little bit better. It just makes the most sense to me. A song that's short and punchy. There's constant rising tension with the strings, and Ben's putting on a great performance on the pre-chorus. I don't know if the pitched down chorus is the best option just because it's taking away the group's best asset. When the band performed the song for Like a Version, Ben sings the whole thing in his crooner mode and it's quite nice. It's also backed by the other two band members sneaking in the riff to "Stairway to Heaven" which works oddly well. They've also done it backed by a string section and it still works even if it's not as scary as perhaps initially intended. Some say that's the sign of a good song, where the bones are simple enough that it can be transposed in all sorts of ways and still come out working.





