Live your life filled with joy and thunder—R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People is 25
Since last year my playlists have been obituaries. David Bowie. Prince, goddammnit. George Michael. Chris Cornell. Steely Dan (half of them). So when I was reminded that R.E.M.’s Automatic For The People was released exactly 25 years ago, I had to celebrate the fact that everyone in the band is alive!!! They’ve disbanded, but they’re alive!! They’ve had medical emergencies, rumors of impending death, and hysterical success, but they’re alive!
And Automatic For The People is still gorgeous and moving—an extended meditation on mortality that makes you want to live. The title of this post is from “Sweetness Follows”. (Turns out I didn’t misremember it after all.)
It’s these little things, they can pull you under
Live your life filled with joy and thunder
I loved Automatic so much that I wore out two cassettes from listening to it constantly, and I bestirred myself to get a passport so I could watch R.E.M. in concert. The first time I ever went abroad was specifically to see R.E.M. There’s a life-changing decision.
I first heard R.E.M. on bootlegs of bootlegs borrowed from my classmate. The ringing guitars, the odd vocals, the baffling lyrics and the sudden sweet melodic turns really got to me. I still know the lyrics to “It’s The End of The World As We Know It”, Leonard Bernstein. (This sounds prophetic now: “Team by team, reporters baffled, trumped, tethered.”) Out Of Time was their big breakout: “Losing My Religion” was suddenly playing in supermarkets. But their masterpiece, I think, is Automatic For The People.
A dying person says, “I have lived a full life/And these are the eyes that I want you to remember.” Someone thinks about his youth and “The photograph on the dashboard, taken years ago/Turned around backwards so the windshield shows…” It’s beautiful.
November 13th, 2017 at 10:17
thanks for this post and important anniv marker. was thinking of cancelling already my spotify subscription. now i’m urged to revamp playlist.
i remember you giving away cassettes of ‘new adventures in hi-fi’ on your radio show years ago. i won one for answering a trivia question. i should still have that cassette somewhere. and that album is also quite good.
my not-so-well-known-but-i-like-very-much REM song is strange currencies. stipes’s singing on that record is truly remarkable. sounds like he is begging and demanding at the same time.
November 14th, 2017 at 04:53
I’m not sure how many people were aware that John Paul Jones collaborated with the band on arrangements to some of the songs that completed the record.
That factoid blew my mind.
November 14th, 2017 at 08:38
volume-addict: For those heartbreaking strings, the orchestration, they looked up one of the masters.
Follow “Nightswimming” with “All Of My Love”, written after the death of Karac Plant. Talk about thunder. Even if Page probably found it baduy.
November 14th, 2017 at 14:06
This and Out of Time are my favorite REM albums. Nightswimming is always the last song I play when I listen to them, then I end up repeating the song manually. I haven’t explored any of their 2000s albums. Any recommendations?
November 14th, 2017 at 16:25
Angus: I love “Near Wild Heaven”. Try Monster. All their succeeding albums are good, but they had moved far from the little indie band from Athens, Georgia they used to be, and their world-view had shifted. And then personnel changes, exhaustion, etc.
Since volume-addict brought up the John Paul Jones contribution, my recent playlists have made perfect sense. I alternate Zeppelin and R.E.M.