The crumbling authority of the Soviet Union’s government led to a protest in East Germany that climaxed with the breaching, and then destruction, of the wall that had divided the people of West Germany from their neighbors in the Soviet-controlled eastern half of the country. In Czechoslovakia, the absurdist playwright, anticommunist dissident, and occasional political prisoner turned pro-democracy leader Václav Havel was named president of the nation by the Federal Assembly. Three months later in South Africa, where the racist apartheid government was on its last legs, the anti-racism activist Nelson Mandela was released from twenty-six years of imprisonment. Within a few years he’d be the president of the nation that once jailed him.

  In the United States the currents were shifting, too. After a decade of Republican rule in the White House, the solidly Democratic Congress was unified in its resistance to the executive branch. And though President George H. W. Bush was still popular with voters, public support for environmentalism, the fight against AIDS, gay rights, and racial justice in South Africa was surging. This was due in part to Rock the Vote, a political advocacy campaign created to raise the political awareness and participation of young voters. Sensing the current of interest among its viewers, MTV began to invest more resources into its news operation, ramping up political coverage as the 1992 election approached.

  And as political issues moved to the center of youth culture, R.E.M.’s political advocacy was manifested in the information tables for Greenpeace, the Nature Conservancy, and the Environmental Defense Fund that accompanied them on all the stops on the 1989 tour. Songs like “Fall on Me,” “The Flowers of Guatemala,” and “Welcome to the Occupation” made the members of R.E.M. seem like oracles of a sort. For a younger generation of music fans, whose tastes were informed by what they saw and heard on MTV, R.E.M.’s political awareness was nearly as crucial as the sound of their music or the fuck-off in their rock ’n’ roll swagger.

  * * *

  —

  A new year, a new decade, new ideas, new sounds. A decade of playing electric guitar virtually every day, climaxing with a year of playing it on arena stages every night, had worn down Peter’s interest in his primary instrument. Now when he got an itch to play, his hands reached for his mandolin, maybe an acoustic guitar. Anything with a different sound, a different set of melodic possibilities. Mike felt the same way about the bass, and even the guitar, heading to the piano or the electronic keyboard when he felt something brewing. Bill did most of his writing on the guitar or piano, hearing songs that drew their rhythmic punch from the grain of the strums or lighter percussion, such as congas or shakers. Piecing the music together, the three instrumentalists sensed themselves moving toward a more ornamented, even baroque sound. Songs that were melodic and lush, textured with strings, horns, and keyboard sounds. The acoustic songs, particularly the ones Peter started on his mandolin, had a keening, poignant feel. Mike’s keyboards layered and twined with the guitars on the brighter songs, and the darker ones combined acoustic, electric, and pedal steel guitars, percussion, and feedback into a midnight garden of sound, blossoms shimmering in the blue light of the moon.

  Often new songs would begin with the three instrumentalists, playing their latest riffs and feels, helping one another expand them, match them with other pieces, merge them into something like songs. Often Peter or Mike would present a set of changes, maybe even a complete tune, for the others to respond to and possibly revise. Bill had his own passages and song models too, and he served as the band’s editor, helping to keep the project focused and moving forward, not overly defined by any member’s individual habitual tendencies. He was the earthy one, grounded and goal-oriented.

  Sometimes Michael would be with them, listening in, describing what he liked, where he thought a song could go. When the others played he’d sing along, looking for the right melody to follow the chords, experimenting with syllables, words, phrases, trying to match the feel of the music with what he was thinking and feeling. One of the darker songs, a slow-burning piece with layered guitars and organ, connected with something simmering in Michael’s consciousness, and when he started singing along, the words seemed to flow through him. It’s crazy what you could have had, he repeated. The music circled around him, guitar tone hanging, dissolving into feedback. An electronic howl of anger, guilt, anguish. I need this, he declared over the looping chords, the buzz and growl. I need it, I need this. It was about a broken love affair, Michael said later. “It’s a love song, but certainly from the uglier side.”[1] It wasn’t done yet, but it was working.

  * * *

  —

  Creating their new music that winter, the band members were off on their own, untethered from previous expectations as they charted their course for the next horizon. One song they debuted during the 1989 tour set the tone for the project. Starting with a simple but funky bass-and-drums pattern that expanded with a tense fingerpicked guitar, the instruments on “Belong” heralded a recitation from Michael, describing a strange but powerful scene. Standing in the light of a window, a woman watches some unidentified creatures escaping from bondage. Her world collapsed early Sunday morning, Michael intoned. There were barricades holding the creatures, he said, but now the unnamed creatures had breached the walls and were on the move. He could have been setting the stage for a horror movie. Wild animals in the streets. A lone woman cradling her child at the window. The weight of those first three words: Her world collapsed. But something else was going on. The guitar rang, the bass throbbed, voices rose and filled the sky with peals of harmony. The woman at the window wasn’t frightened by the rampaging creatures; she was thrilled. To breathe at the thought of such freedom. What she tells her child, who is almost certainly too small to understand, is in the name of the song: “Belong.” To a movement, to a moment, to a community, to the love of another. A breath, this song, how long?…Belong. The music swelled again, the voices rose, the heart filled with hope.

  Michael went into the new project intending to write about anything but politics, but “Belong,” with its Animal Farm–style metaphor, served as a sequel to “Disturbance at the Heron House.” Only now the revolution had succeeded. As in East Berlin, as in Czechoslovakia, as in South Africa, the barriers fell. And while the stakes for a pop band are minuscule in comparison, R.E.M.’s self-directed liberation helped express the new sense of possibility rising all across the globe.

  34

  Near Wild Heaven

  As winter turned to spring, the music continued to flow. Riffs and chord progressions, verses, bridges, choruses. They’d make demos with placeholder names: “Kerouac #4,” “Speed Metal,” “Radio Song,” “Night Swim,” “Country Feedback.” They’d dub tapes for Michael—sometimes he’d be with them, sometimes not—and he’d cart them home to listen on his own, taking in the sounds and textures, waiting to feel something. See if words appeared.

  That was just a dream…

  If a piece evoked a memory, a flicker of feeling, some kind of visual image, he’d play it again, start to vocalize, look for the melody that went with it.

  This could be the saddest dusk I’ve ever seen, turn to a miracle…

  A melody and words, phrases, feelings.

  The world is collapsing around our ears…

  One track they gave him, an upbeat, multipart thing containing a few bars in waltz time, a driving minor-key verse, and a quick pivot to a sunny chorus, was built around a jangly riff that was so cheerful it struck Michael as the most frivolous thing he’d ever heard. Like “Stand,” only goofier.

  Shiny happy people holding hands…

  More songwriting and individual side projects filled the spring—Michael making appearances with 10,000 Maniacs and Indigo Girls, Peter touring and recording with Kevn Kinney, Michael and Peter teaming up to play at various rallies and shows for Earth Day in Washington, D.C. In July the band congregated at John Keane’s Athens studio for a few weeks of demo recording. In September they moved back to the Bearsville Sound Studios, in the rural hills of Woodstock, New York, where they’d tracked so much of Green two years earlier, with Scott Litt behind the board and Peter Holsapple adding guitar and keyboards.

  If the songs they wrote for the early albums evoked the sonic equivalent of shadows and fog, the new music seemed to sparkle. Even the mysterious creatures of “Belong” wanted to gambol in the sun. Litt, as locked on to the band’s signal as anyone, cast the light from obscure angles; the strings of the mandolins and acoustic guitars were so close and clear they shivered against your ear. The electric guitars came wrapped in violins, bathed in organ, or, often, both. Michael’s vocals were as central as they’d been on Green, and even more textured with emotion. Simmering with frustration on “Country Feedback.” Awed and yearning on “Half a World Away.” Edgy and rambunctious on “Radio Song.” Everything was fair game, nothing was off-limits. They brought in New York rapper KRS-One to add bite to “Radio Song,” layered John Keane’s pedal steel into “Texarkana,” included a harpsichord on “Half a World Away,” and washed swells of Beach Boys–like harmony everywhere.

  The sessions shifted back to Georgia in October, with more work in Athens and then two days of string overdubs in Atlanta. This was where the more elaborate, baroque sound took full dimension. And that one song, the driving minor-key piece built on a fretful mandolin riff Peter had fallen into when he was learning the instrument, had been fitted with a particularly strong arrangement. Peter’s dark-eyed music had struck a deep chord in Michael, stirring the voice of a desperate lover, one who can already sense his coming dismissal. He called the song “Losing My Religion,” invoking an obscure southern expression for freaking out. Pinned between devotion and desperation, his narrator observes his beloved with obsessive focus, proclaims his love, apologizes for speaking. The mandolin peals, the acoustic guitars circle, the drums and bass march forward as Michael keens and worries, corrects himself, and finally throws his hands in the air. That was just a dream, he concludes. Just a dream. The basic track was powerful, but when invested with the cool, resolute authority of an orchestra, the thing went airborne. Warner Bros. staffer and longtime friend Julie Panebianco was in the studio in Atlanta that day, hearing “Losing My Religion” for the first time as the string section did its work. “And it was like, Holy shit!” she recalls. “When the orchestra finished, we were all in the hallway jumping up and down and screaming because we didn’t want to act like that in front of the classical musicians. You just knew it was going to explode.”[1]

  Everyone in the band, Litt, Holt, and Downs, and almost everyone who’d been in the studio with them was certain “Losing My Religion” was the killer track, the obvious choice for a first single. But Warner Bros. Records president Lenny Waronker wasn’t sure. “I was scared of ‘Losing My Religion,’ ” he says. “I thought, What a great song, but it doesn’t sound like a hit.”[2] Unique among record company presidents, Waronker had spent most of his career producing records, ears-deep in the music-making process. He was accustomed to finding the balance between artistry and commerciality, and as he knew, successful pop songs of the early ’90s, the ones that stood a chance of capturing the ear of radio programmers, almost always had a few things in common: sleek electronic instrumentation, economically composed verses, and distinctive, catchy choruses. “Losing My Religion,” by contrast, was built around a folky mandolin. Its verses were long and meandering, and its chorus, such as it was, sounded exactly like the verse. Litt was friendly with Waronker and had been playing rough mixes of the new songs for him, and the label president felt drawn to the punchier “Radio Song,” which had verses and choruses big enough to see from outer space. Why not launch the album with the song that stood the best chance of capturing the fickle ears of the radio audience? What Litt said in response made Waronker think again. “He said, ‘They’ve got an audience they’re talking to, and it’s not necessarily something we can understand.’ And he was right. So, fortunately, Scott saved my ass on that one.”[3]

  More sessions in the fall, climaxing with a few weeks at Paisley Park, Prince’s headquarters in the suburbs outside of Minneapolis. They got the B-52’s’ Kate Pierson in to add vocals to the super-sunny “Shiny Happy People” and the edgy “Me in Honey.” It was early December by then; they’d spent almost a full year on the new songs and were close to being finished. They were also close to certain that what they were working on marked a significant step for them. “It’s the best thing we’ve ever done,” Michael told the MTV reporter who tracked them down in Minnesota. As ever, Peter shrugged off anyone’s attempt at hyperbole. “It’s still us,” he added. “If you don’t like us you probably won’t like this one either.”[4] Peter wasn’t always right about those things.

  * * *

  —

  A new year began, and a new moment for R.E.M. Lenny Waronker could hear it in the rough mixes Litt had been playing him: all the new textures, the strange constructions, the collision of obscure concepts and sparkling, ear-catching execution. “They were using strings, mandolins, all those instruments. You could tell that they were moving, which is in my mind a great thing. When you’re observing an artist starting to take chances. And they went all out. They knew exactly what they were doing.”[5]

  The band members felt the same way. Ken Fechtner, Peter’s closest and most consistent friend since their days at Emory University, heard a new excitement in his schoolmate’s voice in the early weeks of 1991. Michael, through typical layers of irony, declared it a watershed, and not just for the band. “It’s destined to be pop legend,” he said through a chuckle. “Pop history. You’re looking at it. This is it.”[6] Michael tried to clarify his braggadocio a few weeks later. “When I say this record is going to alter the course of pop history, I say it with my tongue pretty firmly in my cheek and a snicker on my lips.” But then again…“I don’t think anyone else is doing what we’re doing right now, so it really is out of time, out of place. It’s not fitting in with what’s going on in music right now. And I like that.”

  It wasn’t just sales talk. Song after song, the new work had the shimmer of gems. “Radio Song” echoes the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B” in its opening notes, then shifts abruptly into a rock/funk rampage, flips back to power pop, then to the heavier sound, as if some large hand was spinning the dial behind Michael’s vocal. Which is, of course, declaiming on romantic, cultural, and sonic disconnection: The world is collapsing, he sings. He might be talking about current events, about a romance gone wrong, about anything, but right now he needs inspiration, information, some kind of comfort. The radio dial is full of sound, but none of it helps.

  When Michael runs out of words, he steps aside and KRS-One, whose voice kicks off the song (Hey, I can’t find nothin’ on the radio. Yo, turn to that station…) and who has been observing throughout, amplifying some words and interjecting others, steps up to deliver the final verdict in the form of a brief, furious rhyme: all the radio gives us, to paraphrase Shakespeare, is what it’s always offered, a nonstop barrage of sex and violence ultimately signifying nothing. “Radio Song” became the album opener, an extension of Green’s “Pop Song 89,” simultaneously denouncing and elaborating on the same thing. This time the punch line would come when the album featuring “Radio Song” launched and made R.E.M. a dominant force across all of the most powerful radio formats. The irony was nearly perfect.

  Terse, dark, and amelodic enough to feel like a spoken-word piece, “Low” appeared on the Green tour around the same time as “Belong.” The music, all plucked strings, hollowed-out congas, and organ drone, gains intensity as it goes, but the narrator is too far gone to notice anything beyond the blear of his malaise. “Near Wild Heaven” approaches the same terrain from the opposite direction, setting its end-of-the-affair gloom amid sunny Beach Boys guitars, falsetto harmonies, and a chipper beat that isn’t just near heaven as much as pure Shangri-la-la-la. In that light the bleakness doesn’t stand a chance.

  The recurring clash of melancholic lyrics and elaborately tooled music gives Out of Time the same dynamic tension created by Brian Wilson for the California boys’ Pet Sounds. “Half a World Away” contrasts a persistent mandolin with a regal organ and harpsichord duet, all of it animating the ecstatic confessions of a loner redeemed by love. The storm it came up strong, he marvels. It shook the trees and blew away our fear. “Me in Honey” is all fiery self-pity from a spurned father-to-be, set against a driving, droning two-note acoustic guitar riff and a powerful Kate Pierson harmony. “Country Feedback,” the seat for one of Michael’s most witheringly emotional lyrics, is a blistering breakup song, made manifest in layers of acoustic and electric guitar, pedal steel, organ, shakers, and a vocal that shakes like a fist: I was central, I had control, I lost my head / I need this, I need this.

  Contrast, paradox, contradiction, confusion—they come up again and again. And the most jagged unrest springs from the agreeably goofball lyric Michael affixed to that sugary guitar riff Peter crafted for the tune Michael dubbed “Shiny Happy People.” As per its title, the song plays like an explosion in a candy factory, raining multicolored gumdrops across the land. The wolves, lower or otherwise, are nowhere in sight, nor is the reaping wheel that spun through those early R.E.M. songs. Instead it’s all good-natured guitar jangle, a rich organ line, another elegant string section, and three-part harmony (Kate Pierson’s strong, warm voice taking the high end) supporting Michael at his most companionable, leading a sing-along about how nice it is to feel good. The guitar whirls past, the snare cracks on the beat, hands clap, the singers seem to be do-si-do-ing around the room, all so shiny, oh so happy, their hot little palms pressed together as they urge us to join in the fun. Put it in your heart, where tomorrow shines!