One of the band’s many songs about sleeping, “Sleepwalker” is a fun and straightforward song from Oddments with some noticeably analogue production featuring channels cutting out half way through. The simple strumming pattern paired with its easy going attitude creates one of the lightest moments on the album and in the band’s discography as a whole.
The song’s origins start back around 2011 at the time of Willoughby’s Beach. According to Stu, “Sleepwalker” was written for the EP but for whatever reason was cut and later reworked into the Oddments version. A demo for the song was released on Demos Vol. 2: Music To Eat Bananas To, which lines up with other demos from the Willoughby’s Beach era with its DIY production and drum machine (see the demo for “Let It Bleed” on the same compilation for a good example). While the demo contains the iconic vocal melodies from Stu, its lyrics are hard to make out but definitely different from the studio version. We believe the unused lyrics are “Was that why you’re in the room,” “find my baby a bottle of water,” “I’ve got a feeling why our bed broke” and “you’re already feeling better.” It also features a solo while excluding verses and any breaks. According to an early Oddments track listing from December of 2013, the song had the title “Who? He (Sleepwalker).” The liner notes for Oddments gives credit to Jarrad Brown of the band Dorsal Fins (who previously helped on Float Along — Fill Your Lungs) for his help recording the song. It was released on March 7th, 2014.
The earliest known appearance of “Sleepwalker” on stage was on 2014-03-27, making it one of the earliest songs from Oddments to be played live. It was played pretty reliably throughout 2014 even making two appearances at the band’s first date in America on 2014-05-02. The electric version was performed in the band’s main set while an acoustic version between Stu, Cook and Joey was played elsewhere. While it would also appear in 2015 and 2016, it would seem to be less frequent than 2014. In 2021 the song was awoken from its slumber for the band’s acoustic shows where it would remain a popular choice. Starting on 2022-03-05 at the Return of the Curse of Timeland festival, the electric version would return and remained the dominant version of the song in setlists. Here the song became an occasional target for jams, with shows like 2022-04-17 and 2023-03-09 showing the song as a destination out of another song. While the band had entered jam band territory by this point, “Sleepwalker” never went over six minutes at most.