R.E.M.'s late period contains one album’s worth of great music

Let's build it, then! (I Fixed Your Album, Ch. 11)

Not pictured: evidently the most consequential rock drummer ever.

I Fixed Your Album is an ongoing series in which I fix your albums.

I have some hot takes on the R.E.M. catalog. First, I am about 90 percent sure “Shiny Happy People” is secretly a very dark song about the AIDS epidemic¹. Second, I don’t believe Monster is really the most discarded album of all time; it only seems that way because its bright orange packaging makes it uniquely visible in used-CD bins.

Third, their music has not actually been lost to history or unfairly memory-holed.

Sometime during the years since R.E.M. broke up in 2011, this dubious talking point became codified. It insisted the band had been forgotten, that their visibility today was almost nonexistent relative to the breadth and importance of their work and the band’s commercial presence during their peak period. You see this argument in forums, retrospective lists and vaguely credible tweets and hear it reiterated anytime the band is mentioned in a music podcast, which is admittedly not often (the exhaustive Scott Auckerman/Adam Scott series notwithstanding).

Why, they ask, is R.E.M. nowhere to be found in today’s cultural space? Why aren’t young artists constantly citing them as an influence, or at least resuscitating them as a t-shirt brand? Why does a band that was ubiquitous for so long, which put out a handful of massively popular albums and several immortal songs, and which basically invented the idea of an indie band crossing over to a vast mainstream audience, not occupy the same nostalgic space as many of their peers from that era? Why, as the kids probably no longer say, isn’t R.E.M. getting their flowers?

In a review of the 2024 biography The Name of This Band Is R.E.M., by Peter Ames Carlin, the Washington Post critic John Williams repeats a version of this premise:

To release eight albums in nine years, from Murmur through Automatic, of such variety and consistent quality, is an achievement that isn’t properly celebrated. Perhaps because they eventually became so huge, so omnipresent, R.E.M. has become unexpectedly underrated. They don’t show up as often as they should in conversations about the greatest-ever American rock bands, and for all the critical adulation of their first decade, only Murmur tends to be given its proper place when outlets such as Pitchfork and Rolling Stone make lists honoring the 1980s. They’re widely credited with popularizing the alternative music scene, and they certainly inspired scores of musicians, but besides some dollops of that “jangle,” no one else has ever really sounded like them.

I could split a few hairs. The two albums after Automatic For the People — Monster (1994) and New Adventures in Hi-Fi (1996) — absolutely were part of that classic run. The argument also is wrong in a more general sense — or at least isn’t right in the way its proponents suggest. The band hasn’t vanished at all. R.E.M.’s music is widely available through every normal digital channel. “Losing My Religion” belongs to the Spotify billion-stream club. They’ve done anniversary reissues of their biggest albums and continue to curate compilations from their vaults. The grunge-soul waltz “Strange Currencies” recently was revived as a long-tail hit thanks to its use in The Bear, an acclaimed TV series. Anytime the ex-bandmates — frontman Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry — are in the same room together, it ricochets around Gen X social media. The group’s classic lineup was inducted last year into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Even if nobody has precisely imitated their sound, generations of rock artists — from ‘90s alternative to post-grunge to millennial emo to the 2000s indie-rock boom to today’s alt-rock revivalists — are indebted to R.E.M. artistically and spiritually in countless overt ways. No person over 35 could probably imagine a world where “Man on the Moon” and “Everybody Hurts” and “The One I Love” did not exist, and why the hell would they want to?

Still, any milestone, anniversary or morsel of news these days seems to prompt a fresh round of “Why is there no R.E.M. discourse?” discourse. In January, the Washington Post published another piece, this one by Will Leitch, who used the occasion of Stipe’s 65th birthday to explore “How the biggest band in the world disappeared.”

Stolen from the Washington Post. (Eat shit, Bezos.)

If R.E.M. does have a lower profile than other acts from that era, the explanation Leitch offers is numbingly obvious: They retired. Simple as that. In March of 2011, R.E.M. unceremoniously parted ways shortly after the release of their 15th album, Collapse Into Now. The breakup was amicable but emphatic, and by all indications permanent. If that seems strange, it is because actually retiring has become unthinkable in their line of work. Leitch writes:

“Reaching your mid-60s is something fortunate rock stars get to do, and they usually spend their golden years making certain the world still cares about them.”

He’s right. Consider what is required for a band to maintain its profile into middle and old age. It means publicly performing as wax-museum versions of themselves while releasing increasingly embarrassing albums as a pretext to keep touring. It means non-consensually inserting their music into everybody’s personal devices, then spending the next decade apologizing for it. It means doing overwrought anniversary tours or high-concept residencies or deeply depressing nostalgia cruises featuring front-to-back performances of records they made in their 20s. It means subjecting the world to a new single during their Super Bowl halftime performance. It means shortening sets and huffing oxygen between songs while still charging Taylor Swift ticket prices.

R.E.M. opting out of that is perfectly on-brand. As Carlin’s book explains in elaborate detail, the band’s success was a contrarian proposition to begin with. Their treasured early music resists not just analysis but even decipherability, featuring gibberish lyrics from a singer buried in the mix, misleading record sleeves and opaque music videos. They released back-to-back diamond-selling albums (Out of Time and Automatic) while refusing to perform live. Even during R.E.M.’s arena-rock phase, there seemed to be quotation marks around everything they did. They signed an enormous $80 million contract with Warner Bros. and celebrated by releasing an obtuse single (“E-Bow the Letter”) that doomed the commercial prospects of an otherwise perfectly sellable album (New Adventures). So if their whole existence was counterintuitive, why shouldn’t their retirement be?

Has there ever been this much hand-wringing over a DRUMMER?

The difference between R.E.M. and the typical band that soldiers on past its sell-by date is that a version of the group did cease to exist when they were still at or near a creative peak.

It has been 14 years this month since R.E.M. broke up for good, exactly 14 years after Bill Berry left the group following a brain aneurysm he experienced on the Monster world tour. This happened 14 years after they released Murmur. Is there a cosmic significance to any of that? No, but it does mean that the band’s existence as a trio is by far the longest stretch of their arc.

R.E.M.’s discography neatly encompasses three phases: their time as a rising, critical-darling college-rock act on the indie label I.R.S. Records in the 1980s; their major-label rock-radio period between the late ‘80s and mid-’90s; and their post-Berry years, which lasted until their retirement in 2011. Helpfully, for narrative purposes, the band released exactly five albums in each of these incarnations — the first 10 of which are considered good-to-excellent; the final five, minus Berry, not as much.

By the standards of late-phase rock bands, however, R.E.M. remained uncommonly productive. They never took longer than four years to release a new album, each of which has its own character and occupies its own place in the band’s narrative. To broadly summarize, here is how each of those albums is generally remembered:

Up (1998): The “we’ve still got it” album
Reveal (2001): The overconfident “we’ve still got it” album
Around the Sun (2004): The “eh, maybe we don’t have it anymore” album
Accelerate (2008): The comeback/back-to-basics/“we can still rock like we used to” album
Collapse Into Now (2011): The “this is a good enough place to end” album

Each of these records has its pockets of defenders (I used to be a Reveal truther), with the exception of Around the Sun, which even the band disavows, and which is the consensus bottom placeholder anytime a publication ranks R.E.M.’s catalog². All five albums have good songs — some more than I’d remembered, some less. None of them sold very well. The general sense is that R.E.M. lost something essential when Berry left. As Carlin’s book explains, he was unusually involved in the writing process for a drummer, which is a position that many bands, and surely many listeners, seem to regard as expendable. (Safe-haven laws allow bands to leave an unwanted drummer at any Guitar Center location without facing criminal liability.)

Berry’s departure coincided with cultural changes that would have happened anyway, right as the band was aging into midlife. Because my own life is rich and meaningful, I sometimes imagine an alternate late-’90s rock-and-roll universe in which Pearl Jam released “Hail Hail” as the lead single from No Code, and R.E.M. released “Bittersweet Me” as the lead single from New Adventures. (The albums came out two weeks apart in 1996.) In each case, the band’s radio and commercial presence probably would have extended through one more album cycle, but popular music, then saturated by nth-generation grunge-knockoff bands, would have moved on anyway, as younger listeners embraced harder-edged nu-metal and a revival of teen-oriented pop. Next to Limp Bizkit, R.E.M. suddenly sounded very adult, as in “old.” The culture would have de-centered R.E.M. whether Berry had stayed in the band or not.

The “R.E.M. is unfairly forgotten in retrospect” argument ignores the fact that, for nearly half their existence, they were forgotten in real time — one might even say fairly. During the final and longest chapter of R.E.M.’s story, there was not much demand for what they were creating. They got to observe, as an active band, the world passing them by before deciding they’d had enough. That’s 14 years of diminishing commercial viability, 14 years of suspicion about their continued existence, 14 years of rock-music trends coming and going without their participation, 14 years of casual listeners thinking they’d already broken up, 14 years of diplomatic reviews insisting (wrongly) that their newest album was their best work since Automatic for the People, 14 years of pretending not to know they’d become a legacy act even as that legacy was still unsettled, 14 years of previewing the decline we all face as the rocket fuel of youth and young adulthood exhausts itself.

This one goes out to a band we left behind

But… [cue dream-sequence music] what if we could rewrite this history?

Here at I Fixed Your Album headquarters, our casework requires us (me) to envision an alternate timeline that would facilitate the emergence of whatever album we’re interested in creating. Often, the pretext is obvious: a double album that should have been a single album, a period of prolific output that could have been better-represented, conceptual records where the concept was “this is way too long,” and so on. Today’s installment is a little different. We’re editing the entire last third of R.E.M.’s catalog — the post-Berry years — into a single album that would stand alongside their finest work(songs) and send them out on top, just maybe providing a foundation of demand for the lucrative reunion the band still insists will never happen.

Am I doing this simply because I want to hear “Supernatural Superserious” and “Imitation of Life” back-to-back on a playlist that I could have made without all of this additional fanfare? We’ll never know! (But yes.) Either way, today’s fantasy album might require the imagination engines to burn a little more coal than usual, but, here at the end of the world as we knew it, what else do we have going on?

The scenario: R.E.M.’s drummer still departs in 1997, and the remaining members decide to release one more album to serve as a capstone. Their songwriting does not diminish as a result of losing the fourth leg of their creative table, and the subsequent album condenses the next 14 years of creative work into one statement.

The assignment: Assemble the best possible single album from the last third of R.E.M.’s discography, not to exceed the run time of the longest existing album from the post-Berry period (Up, which is 64 minutes long), but ideally much shorter.

The available songs: Everything that was released on Up, Reveal, Around the Sun, Accelerate and Collapse Into Now, plus any non-album tracks from the same time span.

The goal: Rewrite the final chapter of R.E.M.’s discography so history remembers them as a band that released 11 superb albums, rather than 10 good-to-great records and five so-so ones (still a well-above-average hit/miss ratio).

Sound good? OK, let’s begin (the begin).

The tracklist:

1. The Lifting
2. Lotus
3. Supernatural Superserious
4. Imitation of Life
5. Daysleeper
6. Walk Unafraid
7. At My Most Beautiful
8. Mr. Richards
9. The Great Beyond
10. The Outsiders
11. Uberlin
12. I’ll Take the Rain
13. Walk it Back

Runtime: 54:58

Showing my work (the Lord’s work, really)

1. The Lifting (track 1, Reveal)
   While revisiting late-period R.E.M., I wanted to come away with a provocative argument about how there was a full masterpiece hiding somewhere in that part of the discography, but alas, I did not. My favorite of those records has always been Reveal, which is maybe underrated, although not vastly so. The album is charmingly trend-averse; there was no appetite whatsoever in 2001 for lush, orchestral pop records from ‘90s alt-rockers, but they leaned hard into the concept and produced a collection with some gorgeous songs, but also a lot of snoozers. However, Reveal does feature the best album opener from the band’s end run: “The Lifting” is accurately named, with an ebullient Stipe vocal emerging from the track’s summer-y ambience and a chorus that could have fit comfortably anywhere on New Adventures or even the back half of Automatic.

2. Lotus (track 2, Up)
   ”Lotus” is spicy and swaggering, with a riff that might have torn up the rock airwaves if they’d had the sense to release it as Up’s lead single. If “Lotus” didn’t come pre-contextualized with the story of its release, it would fit neatly within the late-’90s micro-genre of quirky, eclectic radio-friendly artists — Odelay-era Beck, Cake, Soul Coughing, Eels — often referred to (by me) as bowling-shirt music. Stipe’s powers as a lyricist remain undiminished; “Monkey died for my grin” is an A-plus bar.

3. Supernatural Superserious (track 3, Accelerate)
   As the “back to our roots” pivot every long-running band eventually makes, Accelerate was billed as a return to the I.R.S. sound mixed with crunchy Monster guitars. It is a brisk and tight collection that rarely manages to sound like anything besides a band desperate to prove they still have their fastball. “Supernatural Superserious,” however, was a strong enough lead single to give the comeback angle some juice, sparkling with all the energy and tightness of Lifes Rich Pageant or Document but enriched by the rueful perspective of middle age.

4. Imitation of Life (track 8, Reveal)

   Surely the best R.E.M. song in this entire five-album stretch, and perhaps the only song from this period to sit comfortably on the band’s highest shelf, “Imitation of Life” is such a late-career standout because it can’t really be likened to any specific earlier triumph. You can’t praise it by saying it would fit on Out of Time, because it wouldn’t. It lives in its own world, as the sore-thumb bubblegum track on an otherwise ornate, serious album.

5. Daysleeper (track 11, Up)

   Probably the wrong lead single for R.E.M.’s debut as a trio, but “Daysleeper” is a lovely slice of melancholia that could have been an Automatic deep cut. It’s kind of cute to hear Stipe, who I don’t think ever had a blue-collar job, singing in the voice of a third-shifter.

6. Walk Unafraid (track 9, Up)

   Excellent secular praise music in the empathetic vein of “Everybody Hurts,” with a giant bear-hug of a chorus.

7. At My Most Beautiful (track 5, Up)
   We’ll close our symbolic side one, and our mini-run of Up highlights, with their gorgeous Pet Sounds homage (otherwise known as the Party of Five song), which was not much of a late-’90s rock radio hit but has transformed into an ageless love ballad.

8. Mr. Richards (track 8, Accelerate)
   This is the “anybody’s ballgame” portion of the exercise, since I’ve frontloaded all of the obvious choices. Judging by Spotify play count, “Mr. Richards” is nowhere near the most popular song on what is nowhere near the most popular R.E.M. album, but more than anything else in the late period, I get big-time I.R.S.-era vibes from this simple yet effective two-chord exercise, whose chorus is buoyed by a lovely Mike Mills backing vocal.

9. The Great Beyond (track 2, In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003)

   The sequel song is a disreputable subgenre, but R.E.M.’s contribution to the Man on the Moon Andy Kaufman biopic more than justifies its existence, even if “The Great Beyond” wouldn’t stand a chance against their “Man on the Moon” in a wrestling match. Not quite a standard, but a confident outing that makes me happy every time I hear it.

10. The Outsiders, feat. Q-Tip (track 3, Around the Sun)

    One of R.E.M.’s less-appreciated contributions to rock-music songcraft was pioneering the practice of adding extraneous guest rap verses. (“Radio Song,” the leadoff track from Out of Time, featured a cheesy but endearing appearance by KRS-One.) Revisiting this tactic in the mid-aughts is either tone-deaf or audacious; today they get the benefit of the doubt, although not enough to challenge the consensus opinion of Around the Sun. The idea of an R.E.M. trip-hop track featuring a verse from Q-Tip in 2004 couldn’t possibly look worse on paper, but “The Outsiders” has winnowed into my brain, where it remains.

11. Uberlin (track 3, Collapse Into Now)

    By staying within R.E.M.’s comfort zone and calmly reiterating the band’s strengths, Collapse Into Now did everything a final album needed to. None of its standouts are going to replace “Electrolite” or “Orange Crush” on anybody’s playlist of all-time favorites, but “Uberlin” comes as close as anything, with a clear lyrical nod to “Drive” (“Hey now, take your pills…”) and another stellar Mills supporting vocal.

12. I’ll Take the Rain (track 11, Reveal)

    Reveal suffers from poor sequencing, and the back-to-back appearance of the two power ballads — “Chorus and the Ring” and the even-more-dramatic “I’ll Take the Rain” — diminishes the latter’s impact. But this is probably their best penultimate album track aside from “Nightswimming,” and is similarly infused with real stakes and an aching melancholy.

13. Walk It Back (track 8, Collapse Into Now)

    The most obvious closer, buried inexplicably in the middle of the last album. Reflective, lovely, thematically circular, and just abstract enough to make you wonder if your ears are working right — quintessentially R.E.M., in other words.

The impact: The ultimate question is whether this fantasy album represents a more desirable path: a single excellent post-Berry record versus five collections of songs that were often meandering and unfocused, but which told their own fascinating story about the bumpy process of growing older with dignity and making art with friends on a long timeline while the world watched with less and less interest. For the band’s reputation, path A would have been undoubtedly better. For the bank account belonging to the version of me who’s shelling out hundreds of dollars for tickets to the inevitable reunion tour, maybe not.

1. Michael Stipe has said “Shiny Happy People” was inspired by the Tiananmen Square protests and that its title comes from Chinese government propaganda. I think it works just as well as an allegory for the AIDS panic, near its height when Out of Time was released. Stipe had already been an outspoken gay-rights proponent even if he hadn’t yet formally come out. While it might be a stretch to suggest the phrase “shiny happy people” is a direct reference to America’s increasingly visible LGBT+ community, there are other clues. “Meet me in the town” = leave the oppressive suburbs and find your chosen family in the city. “Throw your love around” = sex is abundant. “Put it in the ground where the flowers grow” = it could all end in the graveyard. I don’t know.

2. Mine:
15. Around the Sun
14. Accelerate
13. Up
12. Collapse Into Now
11. Reveal
10. Monster
9. Out of Time
8. Green
7. Document
6. Fables of the Reconstruction
5. Murmur
4. Reckoning
3. New Adventures in Hi-Fi
2. Lifes Rich Pageant
1. Automatic for the People