featuring the very best of americana, alt.country and roots music
November 13, 2024
Scott Foley, purveyor of dust
REM isn't an americana band. They don't do alt.country or roots music either. Yet we've never met someone who digs deeply into our kind of music who doesn't harbor an appreciation for the band. We're halfway through Peter Ames Carlin's new book, The Name Of This Band Is REM, an essential read for fans, written by one of our favorite music writers.
Like most music-based biographies, the most interesting part of Carlin's book is his account of how the four members of REM assembled, how the improbable town of Athens, Georgia, gave birth to a movement that would define indie and popular music. The writer portrays a college-aged Michael Stipe literally stumbling into a record store, Peter Buck propped behind the counter noodling a guitar. We look forward to digging further into Carlin's profile.
So we've decided to indulge ourselves in a Lookback Machine Episode devoted to REM, a band that's doubtlessly been one of the most influential musical acts in our lifetime. For this Spotify playlist, we've ignored a few of our usual rules. Specifically, we've not included anything from Around the Sun (2004) or Collapse Into Now (2011). While REM's later releases featured plenty of good stuff, we wanted to focus our list on their releases that were more relevant to what we do here at R&B. We would argue that Murmur, Reckoning, and Life's Rich Pageant do belong here, and that especially the latter is among our favorite albums in any genre. When it was released in 1986, we were working at Everybody's Records, where the staff played the record on repeat for weeks (though it was agreed that "Swan Swan H" was nobody's favorite song on the record). While REM's unlikely commercial high point would come with later albums, our playlist features few of their acknowledged hits. "Losing My Religion" is a phenomenal song, but not one that we need to emphasize in our survey of their catalog.
Since you've asked, if we had to narrow our thirty favorites to just three, we'd have to go with "You Are the Everything", "Just a Touch", and "Half a World Away". Then we'd have to shame you for asking us to choose. Incidentally, the original quartet apparently released something back in June they called REM's Top Forty Playlist (according to Berry, Buck, Mills, and Stipe), only a fraction of which agrees with our own list. But they also gave themselves a full forty (40) songs to work with, which isn't especially fair.
REM: thirty favorites
- "Gardening At Night" Chronic Town EP (A&M, Aug 82)
- "Radio Free Europe" Murmur (IRS, Apr 83)
- "Pilgrimage" Murmur
- "Talk About the Passion" Murmur
- "Perfect Circle" Murmur
- "Harborcoat" Reckoning (IRS, Apr 84)
- "7 Chinese Brothers" Reckoning
- "So. Central Rain" Reckoning
- "(Don't Go Back To) Rockville" Reckoning
- "Driver 8" Fables Of the Reconstruction (Capitol, Aug 85)
- "Can't Get There From Here" Fables Of the Reconstruction
- "Begin the Begin" Life's Rich Pageant (Capitol, Jul 86)
- "These Days" Life's Rich Pageant
- "I Believe" Life's Rich Pageant
- "Just a Touch" Life's Rich Pageant
- "Finest Worksong" Document (Capitol, Sep 87)
- "You Are the Everything" Green (Concord, Nov 88)
- "Near Wild Heaven" Out Of Time (Concord, Mar 91)
- "Belong" Out Of Time
- "Half a World Away" Out Of Time
- "Try Not To Breathe" Automatic For the People (Concord, Oct 92)
- "Everybody Hurts" Automatic For the People
- "Nightswimming" Automatic For the People
- "What's the Frequency Kenneth" Monster (Concord, Sep 94)
- "Strange Currencies" Monster
- "Electrolite" New Adventures In Hi-Fi (Concord, Sep 96)
- "At My Most Beautiful" Up (Concord, Oct 98)
- "Daysleeper" Up
- "Imitation Of Life" Reveal (Concord May 01)
- "Supernatural Superserious" Accelerate (Concord, Apr 08)
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To enjoy any Spotify ROUTES-cast, just open Spotify and search for "routesandbranches" to access this most recent playlist, as well as many others from past months. Or click here for a preview:
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