R.E.M. - You Are The Everything:C/D

and what a record green still is.

or g4een if you insist.

Anyway, this song never did all that much for me despite R.E.M. being nothings short of an obsession for me from 1989-1993. I still rate Green as their best album, though, and I too might be biased.

Any another people get their first rock purchases circa 1988-1990?

They manage to pull off that whole capturing a moment style thing like they do in nightswimming and less well in daysleeper without the song being about a specific event a la nightswimmings pretty obvious swimming at night. I think it's better because of that, so yeh classic certainly.

And I always thought it sounded like he was singing "Nice women" instead of "Nightswimming".

is there a Green poll? i couldn't find one.

You didn’t even try to search for compollcate?Dreams, they comPOLLcate my life: REM's "Green"

I love this song, one of Stipe’s best lyrics

My REM OPO, mostly cuz it was soundtrack for 14-yr-old sad boi me. Songs that rewire your brain can’t be denied.

Rare sight; a non-single topping a poll of a classic album. Not many others spring to mind.

This album is all about the non-singles. You are the Everything, World Leader Pretend, Untitled.

I forever asscioate this tune with a scene in which 90210's Dylan McKay writhes in a sofa with agony, tormented by childhood memories.

it’s a hymn i’nnit

and a conjuring tbh

I can't recall if we've discussed it, but did anyone make a note at the time of the appearance of mandolin on the album? Of course it became a more prominent feature, or at least more noticed, on the next album/big hit, but Buck trades his guitar for mandolin on three songs on this album, and mandolin appears in the background of a fourth, too. Yet (for example) I just came across a post somewhere about "Losing My Religion" that makes the observation that Peter Buck played the mandolin, "which he had only recently decided to take up." Well, clearly he had begun to take it up at least two years earlier!

I seem to recall an interview from around 1987, where the journalist is with Buck in a music store when he decides to buy the mandolin!

xp Yeah I remember commenting on that re: the recent “Losing My Religion” doc on Netflix. They seem to have memory-holed their acoustic turn for the prior album.

(IIRC, Green original had an electric side and an acoustic side (“Metal” and “Air,” or something). They definitely talked about it in Rolling Stone interviews etc. at the time)

It just underlines Green's status as more of a transitional record where they were starting to work out the ideas that would flower on Out of Time. Makes sense that it's sort of buried in their own sense of their timeline

I bet you could make a great, great record by combining the best of "Green" with the best of "Out of Time." And make the worst, most annoying EP by combining the respective same from both records.

I mean, Green is my favorite album of theirs (I wouldn't change a thing about it!); and there's very little I come back to in OOT...

Green is my favorite album of theirs

I don't scoff at or disrespect this but can't wrap my head around it personally.

xp to Josh, I want to see your tracklists for that LP and EP!

I'm not sure I would change a thing about Green either! But I do think a couple of its songs would really fill out that shitty EP.

R.E.M. "Clear the Room" EP

"Radio Song"
"Get Up" (don't hate it, but still kinda annoying)
"Shiny Happy People"
"Stand"
"Pop Song 89" (don't hate it, but can still be pretty annoying)
"Endgame"
Bonus EP track: "Happy Furry Monsters"

"Get Up" and "Pop Song 89" would be two of a handful of keepers from Green for me, but I see what you're going for.

That’s just a bad mix, you could do that with anything! Those are mostly good songs individually, they just don’t fit together.

"get up" rocks, come on

I think I decided “Get Up” is my favorite REM single, on the thread I started for that topic.

I said I didn't mind "Get Up." And of course someone likes everything, probably even "Radio Song." I just picked the songs I was most personally on the fence about (at best) or that I literally always skip (at worst).

"Dreams they complicate my life" is the best line Stipe ever wrote.

I even like the music box stuff in that song, tbh.

I remember the feature where Peter buys the mandolin, too. In New York City.

I really like Radio Song, all of it, the flipping through the radio intro, the way the apparent sound of it changes thirty seconds in, the KRS-ONE part -- all of it. Knocked my socks off when I first heard it like few opening tracks ever have.

I mean imagine being really into REM and waiting and waiting for the new album to come out and you finally get the cassette and put it on and hearing THIS. It was authentically startling!

there really isn't much wrapping on "Radio Song" tbh

I mean it's no "You Are the Everything" that I'll admit

Appropos of not much, a Chelsea/Madrid soccer game is on the TV – the announcer just said (as the camera lingered on Thomas Tuchel, Chelsea's coach) -- "Any R.E.M. fans here? There's something very Stipe-ian about Thomas Tuchel... he looks like, maybe, 1992-era Michael Stipe. Shiny Happy Tuchel?"

My take on Out of Time when it came out was that R.E.M. had sort of become muzak, although in a way that was still really cool and affecting. I guess I hear a little of their old style in something like Peter's guitar riff on "Shiny Happy People," but it felt like an album where the old R.E.M. sound was pretty much gone.

I felt the mystery had departed from their sound at that point.

They kind of got some of it back on the next album, though.

They'd replaced the mystery with a mystery toughened by legibility, if that makes sense.

I see their development running closely to Roxy Music's post-Eno till 1975.

I would agree with that. "Half a World Away" and "Country Feedback" are still very skeletal as narratives and impressionistic.

I guess I could see "Country Feedback" as their "Just Another High", but I don't have enough investment in Stipe's persona to make me like it.

Also, while Roxy's music grew in complexity and harmonic sophistication, R.E.M.'s decreased over this period.

That distinction is unclear to me. I do think their early music might have had a little more formal abstractness, but I wouldn't really put that down to harmonic sophistication or complexity.

man, i should put this album on, it's been ages and hearing "You Are The Everything" in my head it is startlingly beautiful

iirc half a world away and country feedback rule? not really feeling this hongro-ass harmonic complexity angle.

hongrocore

geirwave

"Half a World Away" is the best song on Out of Time, and it does do interesting things with the melody and chord progression in the chorus.

Nice version from the reissue with the words not quite finished

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVY4nRn-JzY

yeah, i love both of those songs!

I love most of Out Of Time but World Leader Pretend is the only song I really love from Green

I think that demo Blackbirds has a better vocal than the album version

funny that the convo has shifted to Half a World Away, I always think about it of a piece with You Are the Everything. It plays with a lot of the same melodies and arrangement. I think I like You Are the Everything more. But I also think I agree with YMP that the vocal above is better than the OOT version of Half a World, it's just a wee bit more relaxed and understated

"You are the Everything" is I think more of a "song." "Half a World Away" seems more of an evocative fragment, a la something on "Another Green World." They're both really pretty.

agreed. both songs, for me, would be elevated though by the warmer production that came in on Automatic for the People. But that was the first real REM album that I loved and knew backwards and forwards, so my ears have never really been able to hear Green and Out of Time without that as a superior point of comparison for me. The IRS records are more of a different beast that don't have to be judged in that context by my brain.

REM poll gonna be lit whenever we get to it

Gonna be "Litt"(?)

Lol

Title possibilities

Life's rich POLLgeant

POLLahoga

Automatic for the POLLple

POLLectrolite

Shiny Happy POLLple

Perfect, sir, POLL

Pretty POLLsuasion

oh, duh, Feeling Gravity's POLL, come on

results thread: the POLLers, the only vote that matters

numbering the monkeys: try to POLL us something we don't know

Feeling Gravity's POLL is great, but was used for another thread (Fables track poll).

How about "POLLin' Out in Transit"?

\///\/// It's the ILX SUPER SUMMER R.E.M. POLL OF POLLS RESULTS THREAD \///\///

POLLgrimage, escape momentum

POLLish up the gray

POLLin' Out in Transit is pretty good ... their first single, very recognizable lyric, etc.

Shiny Happy Peo-POLL

ugh ymp already said it my bad!

@ piscesx - FWIW, i've given my blessing long ago for someone to redo the REM ballot poll, on the grounds that i used a very bizarre system where only the top few finishers from each ballot poll were in the noms.... it made sense to me at the time but i think if i'd actually talked it out with anybody i would have realized how silly that was. also it was in 2009.

@ piscesx - FWIW, i've given my blessing long ago for someone to redo the REM ballot poll, on the grounds that i used a very bizarre system where only the top few finishers from each ballot poll were in the noms.... it made sense to me at the time but i think if i'd actually talked it out with anybody i would have realized how silly that was. also it was in 2009.

oops

Can't help feeling the results would be really different now

ah yeah great idea, i shall look forward to a new poll very much.

i believe rogermexico and Hideous Lump have their quarters on the pinball table for it! coming someday :D

POLL on Me

Don't POLL On Meeee (It's Gonna POLL): REM's "Lifes Rich Pageant"

mea culpa, everyone

LOL