Welcome to Readers Week! We begin with a suggestion from by Amber…

[Video]
[7.50]

Ian Mathers: It’s rare – like a couple of times a year rare – that I remember any dream I’ve had, good or bad. (A friend told me once that practically every morning when they wake up they know they were dreaming and it felt vaguely terrifying. I go to sleep and I wake up and most nights there’s nothing in between as far as I know.) And yet those times where I wake up slowly enough that my dream is discernible to my waking self are powerful enough to me that I’ve never questioned their prominence as a cultural reference/metaphor/etc. But in my (limited) experience, the power of dreams isn’t terribly overt. So while there are songs that have disappointed me because they never quite take off, when the chorus to “You Were in My Dream Last Night” comes and it’s so much gentler than I expected, it has the opposite effect. Maybe it’s that the whole song does such an indelible job of evoking the soft regret I feel when my dream did involve me making some emotional connection or resolving some wounded relationship that hasn’t managed to happen in real life, the way the wistfulness of feeling like it should be fixed persists even as the details fade almost immediately from my mind. There’s something terribly sad about the happiness in that kind of dream, like a glimpse at a different path that could never have been taken. On those mornings I feel painfully delicate, but also wonderful; somehow this song gives me those moments back. Maybe it’s also that Babygirl capture the way this kind of dream can make you want to reach out to someone you haven’t thought about (let alone talked to) in a long time, even if things worked out for the better for you both, even if you don’t want to change your life. It can feel like the other person must have felt the same thing you did in your sleep, or like they deserve to know what happened. But nothing happened, really.
[10]

Juana Giaimo: Even though the lyrics are sad and very nostalgic, I like how the music is more gentle and her voice sounds absent-minded, wandering through different scenes with a calmness. A great example of a song about dreams being dreamy. 
[7]

Will Adams: The kind of crush song that isn’t an explosive proclamation but rather a bashful admission, the kind that you wouldn’t dare say to them, even though you want to so badly, even though that would leave you sprinting a mile away immediately after, hand covering face. The ending is the tell: the ghostly choir and gauzy guitar immediately vanish, leaving “but that was just a dream last night” to snap you back to reality, yearning for the confidence to just say it.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: Babygirl don’t remember the ’90s, in the literal sense — vocalist Kiki Frances is young enough her influences include Hilary Duff! Yet they sound more authentically ’90s here than many people who were actually alive for it. Sweet and gauzy, “You Were In My Dream Tonight” recalls Ivy or Emm Gryner or Sixpence None the Richer, but a less-produced version: tiny in a good way.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: The loping guitar is swept away by low humming bass to make way for Kirsten Frances’s soft, pulsing voice. It needs very little of the guitar and synths and cooing echoes to make her lyrics float, melting together as she begins the chorus, so full of love and and worry. Her feelings are so bright and taut and exuberant that she worries about it slowly rotting in her teeth. So as the chorus begins again, Frances fills it with the excitement a world away in the eyes of her lover, so luminous and vibrant the fear is cast into shadow, beyond her sight.
[8]

Alfred Soto: What a lovely tune — a musical sigh as lovelorn and delighted to be lovelorn as any by Sarah Cracknell’s. The keyboard curl around the drums with precision. Too much of this and we might have a rather welcome collective erotic escapism. 
[6]

Edward Okulicz: If in the wrong mood this could be too fey for its own good in how the verses dance around the feelings the title make clear. But despite that, it’s still lovely and hopeful. 
[8]

Iain Mew: If this hasn’t already soundtracked some key scene of longing in a movie or TV, that’s surely its natural destiny. It’s gauzy classicism works really well at casting a mood as long as you don’t focus too much on the details, epitomised by the bizarrely flubbed Beach Boys reference, which quotes a whole line as if it were a title.
[5]