Sleep

Craig Hella Johnson & Company of Voices

I’ve never understood people who could throw a CD in the stereo and go to sleep. Even at my most exhausted, my ears will not disengage from the sound long enough to let my mind wander off to dreamland. Still, as a veteran insomniac, I’m always on the lookout for music that might become my adult lullaby. To that end, Eric Whitacre’s Sleep couldn’t have sounded more attractive. The four-plus minute setting of a poem by Charles Anthony Silvestri is delivered here as a powerful hymn by the Texas-based Company of Voices. It would be a very worthy accompaniment to a well-deserved rest, but I don’t think I’ve found my aural sleeping pill here. Silverstri offers a poetic explanation: “A thousand pictures fill my head/I cannot sleep, my mind’s aflight/and yet my limbs seem made of lead.”

—MS