Lost Between the Notes: My Top 10 Album Reviews, Part 4

I have got to find the river
Bergamot and vetiver
Run through my head and fall away
Leave the road and memorize
This life that pass before my eyes
Nothing is going my way — “Find the River,” R.E.M.

***

Twenty-eight years have passed since R.E.M. gave us an album that is drenched in beauty, sadness, exultation and mystery. These words could surely be used to describe multiple R.E.M. albums “Life’s Rich Pageant,” “Out of Time,” “Monster,” “New Adventures in Hi-Fi” but rarely does an album, any album, reach the emotional heights of “Automatic for the People” in the potent culmination of all of these elements coming together to form one of the seminal albums in rock history.

“Drive,” which opens the album with a simple picking of a Dm chord, reminds me, from a songwriting standpoint, of “Losing My Religion.” Both songs don’t seem to have much of a chorus or any sharp delineation between sections, yet somehow, both songs flow seamlessly in their own way to create a hypnotic, endless loop kind of feel. As the first single for the album, “Drive,” was a bust, and without a recognizable chorus or much of a hook, that’s not surprising. But as one of a great many R.E.M. songs that are challenging, both lyrically and musically, it has a certain power as it unfolds from the single arpeggio to the soaring strings and Peter Buck’s droning distortion near the end to Michael Stipe’s often inexplicable, yet metaphoric and moving lyrics. Almost as if Stipe is speaking about the band or himself, refusing to be put into a creative box, he tells us at the end, “Hey kids, rock and roll, nobody tells you where to go, baby.”

The next song is one of the emotional high points for me in all of R.E.M.’s discography. This album has several of those markers, which is why it’s number four in this list, and it very well could be number one, as there isn’t much distance between my top five.

“Try Not To Breathe” was especially poignant to me because it seems to relate the end-of-life thoughts of an old person who wants to go out on their own terms.

I will try not to breathe
This decision is mine
I have lived a full life
And these are the eyes that I want you to remember

I lived most of my adult life with chronic obstructive lung disease before receiving a double lung transplant, and even as a 20-something, I sometimes felt brittle and ancient, like my better days were far behind me. COPD is a slow-progressing condition such that, while you might not see much of a degradation in breathing capacity over the course of a few months or a year, the years begin to pile up, and one can tell a distinct different between what was possible from an exertion standpoint as a teenager versus what one could do 10 or 20 years later. COPD is a merciless, exhausting disease, and after awhile, the emotional weariness of struggling for breath every day begins to take a toll. On some days, I wanted to give up. Some nights, I wished to go to sleep and not to wake up. Without a transplant, there was no way out and no escape. I was drowning to death.

“Try Not To Breathe,” then, speaks to me of these thoughts: of wanting to die, of wanting to be remembered as a person who loved life, as a person who still loved life but simply couldn’t continue under the weight of immense suffering and personal anguish. Yet, in this beautiful and poetically vivid song, the character does not seem sad. He or she is almost triumphant, as if they are reclaiming their freedom and wanting to be liberated from a fate that threatens to rob them of joy. I was diagnosed with COPD as a teenager, but I did not breathe well all through my childhood, and by my early 20s, I had almost enough, and my joy for life was being eroded, painfully, day-by-day. I don’t want to dwell on my health here, and I don’t actually like talking about it, but this is a personal list and many of the songs that I have and will talk about, quite literally got me through some of the darkest days of my life. “Try Not To Breathe” is one of them.

Members of R.E.M. and producer Scott Litt must have known that, after a heavy song like “Try Not To Breathe,” listeners might need an emotional breather and a little levity. Decades hence, many of us still have no idea what “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” is about, but the lilting music and Stipe’s almost indecipherable lyrics and the chorus line, “Call me when you try to wake her up,” provided a freewheeling pick-me-up fans needed in the same vein as “Stand” and “Shiny Happy People” with references to Doctor Seuss, Nescafe, instant soup, black-eyed peas and a candy bar. If the previous song dealt with the potential loss of joy that comes with contemplating one’s own mortality, “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” helps us reclaim the joy and the childlike perspective of youth.

Andrezej Lukowski, with Drowned In Sound, suggested that if “Everybody Hurts,” the album’s fourth, had not been so popular, whether “Automatic” “might have ended up viewed as a sort of bleaker, hipper, tangent to ‘Out of Time,’ a ‘Nebraska’ (Bruce Springsteen) or ‘On the Beach’ (Neil Young) if you will.” Lukowski calls the song “atypical” for R.E.M. it certainly is a departure from the dark and weighty, almost Southern Gothic, lyrics on old age and death in “Try Not To Breathe,” “Sweetness Follows” and “Find the River” but “Everybody Hurts” is keeping with the album’s emotionally piercing material, except that in this song we get a message of solidarity and shared pain.

After a beautiful musical interlude (“New Orleans Instrumental No. 1”), which are typical on many R.E.M. albums, comes one of many songs on this record that manage to be both bleak and beautiful. One line summarizes the whole song.

We were altogether, lost in our little lives.

The message of “Sweetness Follows” seems to be a simple one: to appreciate friends and loved ones now before they are gone, and it’s too late.

Almost every album has a musical hinterland, where the songs get a little more experimental and less accessible. Some might say that the following three songs, “Monty Got a Raw Deal,” “Ignoreland” and “Star Me Kitten,” reach this territory on “Automatic.” I don’t think there is a bad song here. They aren’t as personally meaningful to me, but they are still must-listens, especially “Ignoreland,” which features Michael Stipe almost seething with rage about the conservative political landscape in America, especially the Reagan years.

These bastards stole their power
From the victims of the Us v Them years
Wrecking all things virtuous and true
The undermining social democratic downhill slide into abysmal
Lost lamb off the precipice into the trickle down runoff pool
They hypnotized the summer, ninteen-seventy-nine
Marched into the capital brooding duplicitous
Wicked and able, media-ready
Heartless, and labeled
Super US citizen, super achiever
Mega ultra power dosing, relax
Defense, defense, defense, defense

This is Stipe at his most acerbic. The melodic flow of lyrics, how he sings the words and how they stream together, along with the driving music from Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry, is a remarkable feat of songwriting.

The closing three songs on “Automatic” offer more stunning examples of song-craftsmanship. So much has been said about “Man on the Moon,” Stipe’s homage to Andy Kaufman, that I will move along, except to say that the song has one of the strongest hooks in R.E.M.’s entire catalog.

As I was preparing to write this, I struggled with how to adequately describe my feelings about “Nightswimming,” and I haven’t come up with many answers. I don’t just listen to “Nightswimming.” I am transported into the song by the stark imagery, by the sense of longing for an experience that’s so innocent and childlike that it makes you cry. I press play and wake up, as if in a dream, into the aesthetic of the song. I look around in the dark of night. I sense the blackness all around me. I sense the void. I feel the warm summer air on my skin. I see the moon reflecting off the water as it gently laps the shore. I see a single, empty pier. I see a girl. I see her, and I see myself. We’re naked and unafraid. We feel devious and free in the stillness of night. We get in the lake and plunge the depths. The cool of the water envelopes our bodies. Gravity holds no sway here. We’re suspended. The night takes us in, and we feel alive with nature, with ourselves and with the world locked in a moment.

Nightswimming, remembering that night
September’s coming soon
I’m pining for the moon
And what if there were two
Side by side in orbit
Around the fairest sun?

Nightswimming deserves a quiet night.

The last song on the album, “Find the River,” seems to revisit themes of old age and mortality, and the imagery juxtaposes the beauty and steadfast permanence of nature with the uncertainty of human existence as we all approach the water’s edge and peer into the center of nothingness. As the song suggests, when we’re young, we feel as if we’re almost invincible and old age seems like “light years” away, but as the decades peel away, we become increasingly aware of our own vulnerability and impermanence. We search for meaning and truth. We search for beauty. We search for love. We search for joy, and we search for fulfillment. And yes, we search for the everlasting. For many of us, nature is the closest that we will ever get, and somehow, in its majesty and wonder, it’s enough.

When I was young and full of grace …

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsoubZU0b3o]

R.E.M. – “I Believe”

When I was young and full of grace and spirited, a rattlesnake.
When I was young and fever fell My spirit, I will not tell
You’re on your honor not to tell

I believe in coyotes and time as an abstract, Explain the change, the difference between
What you want and what you need, there’s the key, Your adventure for today, what do you do
Between the horns of the day?

I believe my shirt is wearing thin, And change is what I believe in

When I was young and give and take, And foolish said my fool awake
When I was young and fever fell, My spirit, I will not tell
You’re on your honor, on your honor

Trust in your calling, make sure your calling’s true, Think of others, the others think of you
Silly rule golden words make, practice, practice makes perfect,
Perfect is a fault, and fault lines change

I believe my humor’s wearing thin, And change is what I believe in

I believe my shirt is wearing thin, And change is what I believe in

When I was young and full of grace, As spirited a rattlesnake
When I was young and fever fell, My spirit, I will not tell
You’re on your honor, on your honor,
I believe in example, I believe my throat hurts
Example is the checker to the key

I believe my humor’s wearing thin, And I believe the poles are shifting

I believe my shirt is wearing thin, And change is what I believe in