The Album: Out of Time REM
The Story: Friday Night Videos (because my town STILL didn't have MTV) and I saw this beautiful, strange, skinny guy just flail/dancing around. "Losing my Religion" stands as great video. Cool imagery, regional lyrics, enough suggestion of 'alternative thangs' to make the powers that be uncomfortable I loved it. Just seeing this was enough for me to buy the album.
I knew the band, but my feelings were mixed. I adored several of their songs but hated "Stand" with a passion. "Losing my Religion" cemented me on the pro-REM side.
There was this energy starting to build in America around this time. A lot of bands were creating regional sounds, blending the influences around them (old and new), playing off of each other, adding a local flavor to music the way chefs do to food. Other areas of the country would go on to spearhead this, but REM was certainly representing the South. Even the phrase 'losing my religion' was a regional expression for getting angry.
Out of Time feels like a night at the band's house. KRS One is there, adding vocals on "Radio Song" Kate Pearson sings on several tracks. It's like a bunch of people got together to sing for and with each other and someone just happened to record it.
"Country Feedback" is my favorite song on the album. It's also Michael Stipe's favorite REM song. At that time, I was in that place a lot of teens get into where what they thought was love started turning into this angsty pit of emotional goo.
The music really is country and offers you that purry, lazy seduction of a steel guitar, but with this kind of string distortion and feedback that one might expect more from Sonic Youth. It's a neat kind of marrying of divergent influences.
This song is about that point of romantic exhaustion when you need to let go, but you don't want to. You try everything you can to fix it, but you can't. You don't accept that yet, but you're getting so, so close. The end of the song where he's repeating 'crazy what you could had/I need this' starts at an almost whisper and continues until he's using that loud, hurt voice we all use when we want to convey pain to someone without just screaming at them.
Thank you to: every band out there taking the musical influences of their lives and blending them into something unique and needed
The Lesson Learned: With this album, I learned how to just kind of meditate and stew in my emotions. I would put "Country Feedback" on, well, as the lyrics say, 'on a maddening loop' and just process. This was more directed than the catharsis with albums like Lion and the Cobra. This was about just honing in on that one hurt and dealing with it, like wiggling a loose tooth until you could easily pull it. The whole process can be agonizing, but the relief is worth it.
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