R.e.m. Greatest Hits Cd

[Cris Luczak]

Acouple of weeks ago I asked an amazing group of writers and musicians to tell me what their top 5 Weezer songs are for no reason whatsoever. It was so much fun I wanted to do it again with a band that I like even more: R.E.M. I've meandered away from them here and there over the years but if I'm being honest they were my first Favorite Band and when all is said and done will most likely end up as my last Favorite Band on the day I die.

Please keep sending in the pictures of your copy of A Creature Wanting Form (my new book of short stories). I promise you it is the best thing I have ever written. Or the most me thing I have ever written. Pick it up here or wherever you order books from.

Andrew Sacher

This might sound like a strange take to some people but I actually think R.E.M. are underrated. I think a lot of people who mostly know them through their hits don't realize how rich the rest of their catalog is. I think they're a little too popular and had too much longevity to be as revered as a Joy Division or a Velvet Underground, but not popular enough to become arena mainstays like U2. I think some people have hated on certain eras of their career, but those eras have often rightfully been re-evaluated. Across 30 years and 15 albums, R.E.M. genuinely have no duds. All the songs in my top 5 do come from their 80s and early 90s albums, but they made great music from start to finish. You can spend a lifetime devouring their catalog, and still discover new stuff every time you go back to it. I'm sure this list will change if you ask me to make it again in five years, but in August of 2023, here's my 5 favorite R.E.M. songs:

5. Feeling Gravitys Pull

I'm a huge sucker for weirdo psychedelic folk music, so Feeling Gravitys Pull had to be on this list. Made with producer Joe Boyd (who had previously worked with psychedelic folk artists like Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, and Vashti Bunyan), it's one of the darkest, strangest, most surrealistic R.E.M. songs ever, and I don't think they get enough credit for opening their third album with a song that, almost 40 years later, would probably still weird out your average R.E.M. fan.

4. Orange Crush

Green was Kurt Cobain's favorite R.E.M. album, which actually kinda surprises me because I think he would have said it was a little overproduced. But maybe it's because a song like Orange Crush put a harder-edged, driving rock spin on jangle pop, and that's what Kurt was trying to do on so many of his songs. No idea, but I'd put this 1988 song up against any 90s alt-rock anthem. Ahead of its time, and that intro snare roll feels like a bolt of lightning every time.

3. The One I Love

You've got one of the best rock riffs ever written, and a sentiment that's so simple and vague that it means so much and so little all at once and nearly everyone can relate to it in one way or another. Fiiiiiiireeeeeeeeeee!

2. Harborcoat

As a child of the 90s, my first introduction to R.E.M. was from my parents listening to classic rock radio, which at the time was already playing some of the big R.E.M. hits, so eventually learning in my teens that Losing My Religion was actually released way closer to Dookie than to Stairway to Heaven was kinda mind blowing. I just figured everything on classic rock radio was ancient. The other mind blowing thing was picking up a copy of Reckoning, which I only did because I'd heard of R.E.M. through those radio hits, and being shocked at what I was hearing. This purchase was made in the era of 2000s indie rock, and this sounded just as current as all the new stuff in that realm that I was listening to. The whole record is a masterpiece but Harborcoat makes this list. The guitar work still trips me up, and the overlapping harmonies that R.E.M. were doing in this era is something I really wish they did more of later on. On this song in particular, they're magical.

I don't care how cool you are, you are not too cool for Losing My Religion at #1. This is just a perfectly written song, and it still stops me in my tracks every time even after hearing it hundreds of times. Sometimes we luck out and the best songs really do become the most popular ones.

It could be argued that Radio Free Europe is the best debut single of all time, especially the Hib-Tone version. I'm more drawn to fragile drone R.E.M. (Country Feedback and E-Bow The Letter) than jangle-pop R.E.M. The way Stipe writes about life and love in abstraction on Losing My Religion remains so affecting to me.

Give the chorus a listen. What is the hook? Is it the Patti Smith part? It comes first, but it feels like it's the counterpoint. Is it the banjo part designed to crawl into your brain until you realize you've been singing it to/at your cat while you do dishes? For how long? Have you been washing the same dish over and over? I mean, I guess it's the Mikey Stipe vocal part, but that kind of also feels like a response part. The chorus is all of these things working together to create a hook. It's a slow, sad song but evokes the same feeling as listening to the intro of Love Song by The Cure. Just these lead parts on top of lead parts building until it's not even about individual melodies anymore, but the fabric they create when they are all together and you sit back and you think, Jesus Christ, these guys are good, and why did I call him Mikey Stipe? Who was that even for? Do I want to sound like I know him? I wish my backspace button worked, but MOVING ON.

This is a vibe that R.E.M. absolutely owns. It's the sound of being sad and yet hopeful, heartbroken, and grateful. It's not exactly contradictory, but it's absolutely an impressive emotional balancing act. Former President of the United States Maria Bamford called it "paralyzed by hope." America's answer to Morrissey, Billy Corgan could summon and cross this musical knife's edge with 1979, but I don't hear it much anymore! Strange Currencies is one of these, and it probably should be on my top 5, but I have not yet seen The Bear, and I'm not sure if praising that song in this moment is like wearing a brand new Kate Bush knock-off t-shirt in a post-Stranger Things world, or not so I am playing this safe (editors note: he means cowardly) (also I wrote that, not the editor. I am an unreliable narrator, you old so and so!)

This was my introduction to the band! At the time I had no idea this level of fuzz and grit was a departure for them. There is this weird feeling that songwriters have that there is probably some fucked up-sounding German word for, but it's when you can play the chords D to G, and it sounds new again. I don't know why those two chords have that power, but you can be playing them, and it can feel like the chords you have heard one hundred times before, and then you change the tempo or the rhythm and BLAM! It's new again. I'm sure that's what happened here. You can always spot it with bands because it's a big statement song. Weezer's Green Album opener starts with a D-to-G song. The tremolo guitar on this song, hell, this whole album transfixed me when I was but a boy, and when those parts were removed when they recently released a remastered version of the album, I absolutely lost it! I wrote letter after letter to my congressperson. Finally, after MONTHS they tell me they "appreciate my passion," but this is not something "a sitting US representative can address." It's like, what are you even for then? Don't my taxes pay your salary? I live in a freakin' blue state! I thought this was America! This country was built on tremolo, as far as I know.

You know what I miss? I miss that type of song that has men yelling rhyming lists at you quickly. I don't know what that's called. Rapid-fire lyrics? Stream of consciousness? No idea. Either way, it's a tradition we don't have anymore (that Fall Out Boy situation doesn't count) and even though it is cheesy, I want it back.

Most people think that Everybody Hurts is about Kurt Cobain. It is not. But Let Me In is, and this fuzzed out ballad is like if someone dropped their Athens-style indie rock on a My Bloody Valentine song and made you a delicious treat. The heartache is palpable, the guitars are aggressive and loud, and Stipe's voice is pleading and lonely. There is even an organ. You cannot deny an organ.

R.E.M. is not a cool band. It's actually part of their appeal; they are absolutely too earnest to be hip. But the tremolo intro, plus the surprise filter on Michael Stipe's voice, is just really bad-ass. The people who are driving around listening to this song are cool as hell, you just know it.

Can you imagine this being your opening track on your debut album? What a statement. What a coup. An absolute mic drop. This song reminds me of a long-held belief: You either die a Morrissey fan or live long enough to make room for REM on your record shelf.

There was a time when you could walk into any CD store in America and find 3,200 blurry orange bear faces staring at you from the bargain bin, festooned with radio station discard stickers, disfigured with wholesale cut-outs in the shoulder, debased and profaned. America was ready to buy this record, but not to keep it. It was radioactive with weird jams. Government advisories were issued.

Being an R.E.M. fan has always been a state of becoming. This band can be your favorite band for your entire life even if you never listened to any of the first or second or third decade of their output (depending on when you discovered them) and no one is mad about that. Should be mad about that. I have friends who love Chronic Town and Murmur and Reckoning and are still mad about Green if you can believe that.

There's a problem, feathers, iron

Bargain buildings, weights and pulleys

Feathers hit the ground before the weight can leave the air

Buy the sky and sell the sky and tell the sky and tell the sky

It bums me out sometimes that I do not think they mean anything to many young people in the way that I think Nirvana does for certain kinds of kids. I was hoping that The Bear needle drop might do something about that.

3a8082e126