Of all the spectacles associated with this year's Super Bowl— zombie children selling insurance! Left Shark! Available as a pay-what-you-will download, as well as a cassette , LP , or super-limited-edition box set that includes a sleep mask and a note from Bridges, Sleeping Tapes doubles as a fundraiser for No Kid Hungry , a charity campaign for which the actor serves as spokesperson. A sleep aid narrated by Bridges would be awesome enough, but Sleeping Tapes turns out to offer far more than that. Flitting between Bridges' gravelly ad-libs and surrealistic short stories, poems, guided meditations, and positive affirmations, it's part comedy album, part Ambien, part conceptual prank. It scores pretty highly as an ambient album, too, full of far-out drones and captivating sound design. I spoke to Bridges last week after his appearance on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" to find out about what it's like to bed down with the dude behind The Dude. Jeff Bridges: Squarespace, a website design company, hired this advertising house to make a Super Bowl commercial and they approached me on it. They didn't want to make a commercial that promoted Squarespace; they wanted to show a website that they designed, and no idea was too wild or crazy.
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Jeff Bridges: Sleeping tapes. Sleeping tapes. Everything implies everything else. Say sleep again, I dare you. Haunting background music. Trippy sleep sleep dream waking up. Sounds like he needs some sleep. Sleep so you can dream. More like scaring me to sleep. Sleep demon from the seventh ring of hell telling me to sleep so he can suck out my soul.
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Jeff Bridges embodies everything that is right with the world and is my new best friend. His soothing voice and grandfatherly presence immediately set you at ease, as Jeff shares some of his favorite sounds. From here, the album takes you on a journey invoking the beauty in simple moments. The real highlight, though, is the minute guided meditation through Temescal Canyon. Here, Jeff encounters another hiker and encourages you to wave at him and then dubs him Neil. In all, the recordings shape a very personal glimpse into the life of Jeff Bridges and invoke one of his best known films, The Big Lebowski. Immediately, I thought of the scene where The Dude, laying on his newly acquired rug, listens to the sounds of bowling strikes on cassette tape. They tap into the Buddhist tradition of meditation to which Jeff is no stranger — he even released a book entitled The Dude and the Zen Master in Though available as a free download, the album can be purchased in physical formats including a signed box set only five are available. Album Reviews.
The first thing I notice in my dopey state is how quickly I come to accept that the ambient noises Bridges has recorded — of flowing streams and whistling wind — are, in fact, outside my window. The most soothing sounds come from Bridges himself, his grunts and whistles sound like a storm brewing or an acorn skimming a lake. I picture him laying in the soil, moss growing over his beard, with a microphone hanging down from a branch. There are some astonishingly lovely moments. A bedtime story about a tenor saxophone player who uses Play-Doh to keep his fingers limber. Bridges talking to some children about how, when his daughter was younger, he agreed to meet her by a special tree in both their dreams. The problem, though, is that, when I sleep, Bridges sticks around. He becomes the narrator of my dreams, passing comment as I go about my imaginative business. I woke up and went to the tap, feeling both quenched and as if a Hollywood actor had rewired my subconscious. Basically, it helps you get to sleep, but it plays with your dreamlike state so much that your concept of reality quickly degenerates.
