A

Count off, Peter

B

Michael Stipe had writer’s block while the band worked on Out of Time in 1990. The band had signed a contract with the mega-label Warner Bros. and gone on a marathon tour throughout 1989 that left him depleted. The preceding three albums (Life’s Rich Pageant, Document, and Green) all featured a confident, even strident, frontman. At times, it sounded as if he had more words than the songs (or his mouth) could hold. On “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It”, he made a pop spectacle of the struggle to fit them all in. But Stipe’s voice does not dominate on Out of Time. It moves, like the protagonist of “Losing My Religion,” between corner and spotlight. It sets the table for some surprise guests, B-52’s singer and KRS-One. It blends in to the mix on the instrumental “Endgame” and the wordlessly-chorused “Belong”. It allows Mike Mills, with his songs, “Near Wild Heaven” and “Texarkana”, and Peter Buck, with his new instrument, the mandolin, to add dimensions to the band that became indispensable.

Even in the lyrics that Stipe did manage to complete, we get characters that are wrestling with words. They have “said too much”, or “haven’t said enough” in “Losing my Religion.” They “skip the part about love” in the quasi-love song “Low.” Their minds are racing (“Half a World Away”) or they’re “on a maddening loop” (“Country Feedback”). The once confident-sounding singer is looking for something.

Ultimately, the title and artwork of Out of Time betray the creative uncertainty that Michael Stipe may have been experiencing. R.E.M. albums had always before been notably conceptual, even if still quite mannered and obscure. Stipe, who was primarily responsible for this aspect, went so far as to insert small coded details into the art as thematic clues (for the initiated). Document had “File under fire” written in the margins, while Eponymous was filed “under grain”, and Reckoning, “under water”. The title of Out of Time’s immediate predecessor Green, was a multiply-layered pun evoking at once the ecological and military themes, the band’s sudden wealth after the Warner Bros. contract, and their feeling of being new and naive in the pop music milieu.

By contrast, Out of Time is a throwaway title. They couldn’t conjure up a proper name, and they literally ran out of time. The artwork, a large black-on-yellow “logo” with a clunky sans-serif, feels like an unfinished mock-up, clip-art on stock images. The textural intensity of Murmur’s Kudzu has been swapped out for the blaring flatness of a billboard advertisement. Of course, Out of Time has it’s own double meaning. The pastoral ruminations, the emotional pinings, the flailing fantasies and looping films of the characters, are all temporally fuzzy. They invite the listener to go “off the clock”, to reject the worldly radio’s song. to drop deeply into the album’s honeyed dreamworld, it’s near wild heaven. This runs contrary to the frank imperatives on Green to “Get up! Get up! Sleep delays your life when, when it’s time to get up!”.

Trains were a common image in R.E.M.’s back catalog (“Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars)”, “Auctioneer”), and the train on a track is an apt metaphor for R.E.M.’s steady march through the 1980’s music industry, as well as its ceaseless touring. In 1990, 10 years into their career, the band finally took a pause. With Out of Time they manage to get off the train, to put down the schedule, to finally “take a break, Driver 8.” The new voices and instruments, the halting embrace of vulnerability, all evoke a desire to grow creatively, in a spirit of collaboration. These aspects are playfully acknowledged (if not teased) in “Shiny Happy People”.

As the band wasn’t touring at the time, and Michael Stipe was struggling to write lyrics, the rest of the band were recording instrumental ideas. They came up with “Country Feedback” in one of these sessions and, since there were no lyrics, gave it a plain, descriptive name. According to Stipe, he heard the track in the studio and improvised the lyric in one go. He has made similar claims about other R.E.M. songs, “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It” and “E-Bow The Letter”. He may be exaggerating, but the “Country Feedback” vocal certainly benefits from an unpredictable and spontaneous feeling. Near the beginning, Stipe begins a thought “These clothes…,” but abruptly stops as if unsure of what to say next. At the beginning of the next measure he picks up again, “These clothes don’t fit us right, and I’m to blame.”

The rhythm section plays one repeating chord progression throughout. They keep it slow and steady, a slide guitar doing the “country” part of the song’s name. Buck brings the “feedback” with a sparse, textural solo, exploring the space left by the other players. As Michael Stipe has most often been the public-facing, inteview-giving member of the band, the legend of the spontaneous, improvised lyric has come to overshadow this other, more understated improvisation. However, it is essential in anchoring the song’s weariness, it’s sadness, as the vocal ratchets up, becomes more pleading, edges up to an emotional cliff, and ultimately shrinks away from confrontation.

Peter Buck plays with a fried tremolo guitar sound for the first time. He would develop this sound to great effect on New Test Leper, and Crush With Eyeliner.

The band considers this perhaps their greatest artistic achievement. Michael has called it his favorite song in concerts. They continued to play it until the end.

C

One of the songs I learned to play guitar on. Em is the easiest chord to play. But it is also the most Emotional. The most poserful.

Learning to take ones self seriously.

D

E

Probably, my entree into the world of adult music, adult art, adult feeling, at 11 years old.

The nature of the explicit. What we think of adult/mature content is usually, actually a sign that adults are acting out some juvenile expressions and impulses.

Swearing

“It’s crazy what you could’ve had / I need this” - analysis of this lyric

Expression of the noir imagination in R.E.M. The tension of this noir imagination with their superstardom.

Undercurrent in some of their hits:

  • Radio Free Europe
  • The One I Love
  • Orange Crush
  • Stand
  • Shiny Happy People
  • Man on the Moon

Songs where that noir side is dominant

  • Feeling Gravity’s Pull
  • Oddfellows Local 151
  • I Remember California
  • Country Feedback
  • Star Me Kitten
  • I Don’t Sleep, I Dream
  • Diminished / Suspicion

The strangeness / queerness in their work makes them difficult to …