R.E.M. announced today that they are no longer a band. This bums me out, and it’s hard to explain why. No one’s coming into my house to take my copy of Automatic for the People, after all. I think that what makes me wistful is that, as we grow older, we change. And sometimes we celebrate the growth and change, and sometimes we want to reconnect with our long-gone self. Having things in your life that have grown older with you kind of helps. I will never be 17 years old, sitting in a newspaper office at Holy Ghost listening to Automatic for the first time, again. I will never be 21, sitting in the basement of the McGinley Center at Fordham, typing an article for The Ram while I listened to “New Test Leper” from New Adventures in Hi-Fi for the first time. (If you’re detecting a lot of newspaper offices in this story, you win a prize. That trip downtown to buy New Adventures was my first official date with Pattie, by the way.) But when I listened to Accelerate or Collapse Into Now for the first time, it was a way for my 36-year-old self to look back and wave at those younger mes. I kinda liked that, and now that particular musical gateway is closed.
I may take advantage of the weekend to ramble a little more on the topic, but for now, I just want to present a by-no-means-complete list of 10 R.E.M. songs that are very awesome.
- Nightswimming, from Automatic for the People.
- Leave, from New Adventures in Hi-Fi
- Fall on Me, from Lifes Rich Pageant
- Half a World Away, from Out of Time
- Let Me In, from Monster
- Uberlin, from Collapse Into Now
- Sad Professor, from Up
- Sitting Still, from Murmur
- The Lifting, from Reveal
- Life and How to Live It, from Fables of the Reconstruction
I went with a one-song-per-album limit there, or I may have just wound up reposting the track list to Automatic. I have around 200 R.E.M. songs on my iPod and I love ’em all. Since it looks like there’s a greatest hits package coming up just in time for the holidays, maybe there’ll be one more chance to add to the list.