Song Explanation: "Sleep is For the Weak"
How to turn alcoholic insomnia in Eastern Europe into $25000 cash
Our most popular song on Spotify has long been “Sleep is For the Weak”; a strange fact, given that we intentionally buried it near the end of an album with a boatload of better songs: “Polka Never Dies”, “Poutine” and “Turbo Island” are all much better. We know full well what’s going on here: legions of weirdos and misfits who drink and smoke too much and who often wear Adidas trackpants unironically are sitting on their broken down cars in parking lots in places like Rzeszów and Nowy Sącz, sipping cans of Zubr (pronounced: “grkblff”) and blissing out as this song sits on repeat.
In other words: it’s the Poles. God love ‘em. They get a whole song on the new album as thanks, it’s called “Problem”. It’s sweet.
"Zajebiście, Kurwa!” - the song’s chorus confuses North American listeners, but basically it’s a garbled Polish curse, featuring a word I still use constantly, the swiss-army-swear kurwa, which has a glorious double meaning of both “whore” and “fuck”. It’s such a beautiful word, try it sometime when you’re really frustrated: koooo—rrrrrroool that rrrrrrr—— VAH. YEAH!
Anyway, so here’s what happened: we took a mild little tour through Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland and the Ukraine. It was fucking insane. We started off by agreeing to do an itinerary which had us driving an average of 11 hours per day between shows. Now just tack on time to, I don’t know… eat, and play a show, and sound check, and ask yourself, dear kind warm funny intelligent readers: what is there no time for?
Baltic is at your back
You'll head towards the Black
Where the river's rising high
All along the countryside
Chuck in a world-historic flood in southern Poland, cans of beer and bottles of slivovitz and vodka endlessly rolling around in the van, an arsehole Polish tour manager who couldn’t even speak Polish and who demanded to sit in said van taking up valuable sleeping space, and you have a recipe for five young alcoholics to basically poison themselves nearly to death on no sleep. As we piled into the van at 5am each morning… or one night even directly after the show… we repeated our mantra: “Sleep is for the weak”.
But SIFTW would never have happened were it not for what happened at the end of the tour: an opening slot for Goran Bregovic. The rhythm of this song, its intro and its feel, are directly lifted from Bregovic. The concert at the Stare Misto festival was formative: watching Bregovic, we realized just what sort of power trad-folk can have when the young people of a given culture truly appreciate it. We returned to our home continent completely dead-set on bringing this kind of energy to young adults. As I wrote at the time: “Let's just say that if I ever have to sit on a fucking lawn-chair at some Canadian folk festival again and listen to some brain-dead weirdo covering Joni Mitchell on a harp, I'm going to think about the Stare Misto festival. And then I am going to kill myself.”
Never alone, never afraid
Śliwowica under the shade
You'll greet the sun with bottles high
Your bodies pale against the sky
I’m proud of these lyrics, they really capture the sense of desperation and adventure here. Push, climb, keep doing it, keep drinking, no sleep, play another show, drink some more, no sleep, spend so much time in the van that your skin loses three shades and when you find yourself waking up in a wheat field in the Ukraine having pissed the last night away with Seamus; greet the sun, squint at it, have another shot of whatever the hell is in that bottle, get back in the van. Kurwa.
And people wonder why I’ve never had a mid-life crisis. I had my damn adventures. I’m all good now, no more of those, thanks.
I was always kind of curious as to why that one was always in the top 5 (currently #2). Now I know, and now its one of my favorites. It's really a battle-hymn for van-life! Powerful.
Always love to hear the stories behind the songs/lyric analysis. This was my first Dreadnoughts song so it'll always be a favorite for me!
Would you ever consider doing a post like this for Daughters of the Sun? I read in an interview that it was about the suffragette movement and would love to know more--what inspired you to write it? Any favorite lyrics? (And especially given the recent events surrounding women's rights (*and the rights of other pregnant people) in the US. It's infuriating to think that we'll be fighting for the same rights our mothers and grandmothers fought for. I guess you don't get more punk than that.)
Of course no worries if not--and I'm so excited to listen to the new album!