Album: Murmur
Year: 1983
. . .
File Under Conversation
“9-9” just might be my favorite R.E.M. song . . .
I’ve always felt that the dissonant, offjointed “9-9” was the secret key to just how great Murmur was. Sticking it in the middle of side two, after all of the beauty of the first side and the rumble that started the second was like a statement of purpose: “yeah, we can do the soaring jangly songs, and we can do the lushly melodic ballads, but we can also do this weird-ass tone poem of utter incoherence.”
Oh, and I found out recently that I’ve been mispronouncing the title this whole time.