We're Not Who You Think We Are
Album: Document
Year: 1987
. . .
File Under Fire
“The One I Love” just might be my favorite R.E.M. song.
At the very least, it’s one of their most important songs, a big-riffed mean as fuck rock ‘n’ roll song that somehow stormed the radio and broke into the top ten, pretty much changing everything for R.E.M.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1724: R.E.M. – “The One I Love”
Album: Document
Year: 1987
. . .
File Under Bernstein
“It’s The End of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” just might be my favorite R.E.M. song.
Album: Document
Year: 1987
. . .
File Under Followers
It was the autumn of 1987, and I was going through a pretty tough break-up, which left me drunk and depressed for much of the time, and so at some point, I made a cassette that had the recently-released Document — R.E.M. seemed to be putting out records that coincided with big moments of my love life (which I don’t think was on purpose) — on one side and the dB’s The Sound of Music on the other side.
As you can imagine, I listened to that cassette a lot, and I this memory: I was driving somewhere, listening to this cassette, which just happened to be on side one of Document, and and some point I started singing along with “Disturbance at the Heron House” and realized, for the first time in a long time, that I was going to be OK.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1722: R.E.M. – “Disturbance at the Heron House”
Album: Document
Year: 1987
. . .
File Under Acumen
Hey kids, that sound you hear at the beginning of “Exhuming McCarthy” was made by a thing called a “typewriter,” which basically was a computer keyboard where the monitor was made out of paper instead of pixels.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1721: R.E.M. – “Exhuming McCarthy”
Album: Document
Year: 1987
. . .
File Under Rearrange
In Major League Baseball, there is the concept of the “walk year,” the final year that a player has on a contract prior to becoming a free agent. As a player, what you want in that situation is to have a great year, because it will obviously increase your value on the market.
In 1987, R.E.M. was facing the equivalent of their walk year: the last album on their original contract with I.R.S. records, and while every record they’d made sold better than the previous one, they were still seen primarily as a critics band. Not so much after Document, which landed them their first Rolling Stone cover (a thing I’d been predicting since Reckoning), their first major hit single, and their first platinum record: the equivalent of a .312/.442/.563 slash line in their walk year.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1720: R.E.M. – “Finest Worksong”