Tag Archives: automatic for the people

#1424: R.E.M. – Try Not to Breathe

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I’ve got two more songs by R.E.M. left to write about after this one. I’ll leave it to you to figure out what those are. But I can give a clue. They both begin with ‘W’. But as for any from the band’s Automatic for the People, this is it. ‘Try Not to Breathe’, the last of the representatives, even though I only started with ‘Man on the Moon’ relatively recently. ‘Find the River’ would definitely have had one if I properly knew about it. Automatic… It’s a pretty good album, isn’t it? I downloaded it way back in maybe 2013 or something, just ’cause I saw somewhere that it was considered to be one of the best albums ever. It might actually have been on BestEverAlbums.com. But it wasn’t until 2018 that I embarked a full R.E.M. discography discovery, going from Murmur to Collapse into Now in two weeks while I was at work. Got to Automatic… day, played it loud through the stereo system (it was just me in the office) and really heard it in a way I hadn’t before. ‘Try Not to Breathe’ was one track in particular that really stood out on that listen.

To preface everything I’m about to say, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe dissect the song in its dedicated episode on the Song Exploder podcast. They talk about elements in the production that I’ve never picked up on myself, as well as its origin and inspiration. So you can listen to the guys who wrote the thing. But I’m gonna write this without listening to that, so excuse me if I repeat anything in it. In my experience, one thing in particular that’s always stuck out to me on ‘Try Not to Breathe’ is Michael Stipe’s vocal. And you might say, well, duh, his vocal’s the highlight in a lot of R.E.M. songs. But it’s this one where it just sounds good, you know? It’s a heavy topic he’s covering too. The track’s from the point of view of an elderly person who’s ready to die, reached the point where they’ve realized their time on earth is done, and doesn’t want to be a burden to the people looking after them in their last days. Okay, I did a sneak listen of the podcast. It’s about Stipe’s grandmother. ‘Cause of this, you’d think he’d take on a minor-key, downbeat kind of vocal melody and delivery. It’s the complete opposite. It’s upbeat, a bit sprightly, skips along the waltzing tempo established by the musicianship of Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry. Gotta love a 3/4-time tune. Or is it 6/8…

I’d like to point out that this the first instance on the album where Stipe sings a drawn out “Oh” over the music, as he does during the bridge. He does this in ‘The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite’ and ‘Sweetness Follows’, and each time those vocalizations sound so right to the ear. Is it also right to say that Automatic… is the last album to feature the Stipe-Mills-Berry countermelodies that were such a notable feature on their earlier albums? They’re definitely the notable feature on ‘Try Not to Breathe’, rounding the song out, with Stipe singing the lead vocal, Mills with the higher, soaring countermelody on the right, and Berry on the left with the tinnier “I have seen things you will never see” lyric. A happy-sounding song about death, it somehow lifts the spirits of the album’s proceedings after ‘Drive’, which doesn’t start the album off in the brightest of ways. Further thinking about album flow, there’s something so satisfying about the intro of ‘Sidewinder’ coming in after ‘Try Not to Breathe”s end. It’s like the former resolves the final chord the latter fades out on. Automatic… is R.E.M.’s biggest album, so I think it’s hard to say anything on there is underlooked. But compared to numbers like ‘Everybody Hurts’ or ‘Man on the Moon’, ‘Try Not to Breathe’ sort of is. And you’ve got to hear it.

#1324: R.E.M. – Sweetness Follows

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You know, I’ve been intently listening to R.E.M.’s ‘Sweetness Follows’ for a good seven years now. I thought I at least knew everything that was going on in the song. But when revisiting Michael Stipe and Mike Mills’ track-by-track analysis of Automatic for the People to help me write the post, I was surprised to hear that the fuzzy melody that plays in the centre channel – which I assumed was just a bass guitar of some kind – is actually produced by a cello. And I’ve watched that video before. I guess I just forgot. I’ve also heard cellos before. They’re usually known for their deep, resonant tones. Not the growling rumble that goes on through ‘Sweetness Follows’. But I’m not complaining. During that linked track-by-track recollection, Stipe recalls having a “eureka” moment when cellist Knox Chandler spontaneously played the opening notes you hear on the track. Those notes are looped for the majority of it. They definitely add a unique layer to the production.

‘Sweetness Follows’ is right in the middle of Automatic for the People, the first half closer if you have it on vinyl. And on an album that touches upon mortality and getting older, it’s only right that ‘Sweetness…’ arrives as the album’s centerpiece – seeing as it’s all about the sweet embrace of death and everything. Stipe, whose vocal take I really like on this one, by the way – sings about appreciating those fleeting moments we have in the relatively short amount of time we respectively have here on the planet. To not get wound up in all the drama that can happen because it all gets forgotten about eventually, and when we die, that’s when we get our peace. And we shouldn’t be sad about death because there’s the possibility that there’s something better that comes on the otherside. Sweetness follows. Unless you’re a staunch “When we die, that’s it” kind of person, then this song might not be the one for you. It might just also be about a family argument, according to this interpretation, so you could always lean on that too.

Like the other songs from Automatic… I’ve written about on here, I didn’t fully appreciate this one until I heard it played out loud on some good speakers at work in my first job out of uni. It’s all about the wide open spaces available in ‘Sweetness Follows’. There aren’t any drums in the song. No bass guitar either as we’ve already established. And the lack of a rhythm section greatly allows the textural elements within to flow and make their presence known. That organ in the left? Great. You can hear Peter Buck strumming away on his acoustic guitar in the back. It was his chord sequencing that got the whole track going in the first place. With this funereal mood going on, you wonder how things could change direction, and they do when those cathartic, wailing guitar feedback sections come in, enveloping the soundscape while Stipe and Mills vocalise in the midst of it all. A great number on a great album.

#1274: R.E.M. – Star Me Kitten

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Uh, R.E.M. again? You might be feeling that way if you saw this popping up in your email. Just how the cookie crumbles, I’m sorry. And it’s not as if the song today is a widely-known favourite of the band’s, even though it’s from arguably their best album. I look at the number of plays for ‘Star Me Kitten’ on Spotify, and the cold hard truth is it’s the least played out of the total 12 tracks that make up Automatic for the People. It’s definitely the one that brings about a left turn in the album’s proceedings. But it’s the difference it brings that makes me enjoy it a whole lot more, more than a couple other tracks on there, to be honest.

I’d had Automatic… sitting in my iTunes library for years and had maybe gone through it a few times, but nothing really registered. But bring around 2018, I was at work, brought the album up on Spotify, let it play on the loudspeakers and it was a totally different experience. I’ll leave it to general youth and foolishness as to why I couldn’t get into it before then. I gained a whole new appreciation for the record by the end of ‘Find the River’, which would have had its own post too if I’d got my act together, and the individual tracks within. When it came to ‘Star Me Kitten’, I just remember feeling entranced by it. Those layered Mike Mill vocals in the back alongside the organ? Hypnotizing stuff. And the guitar melody by Peter Buck which Michael Stipe mirrors from front to back with his vocal is all slinky and almost seductive in a way. What really got me though was that descending three-note scale that happens at points during the track. You’ll know what I mean when you hear it. But it was really those parts that got stuck in my head and made me listen to the whole thing over and over.

Why the song’s called ‘Star Me Kitten’ has a pretty simple story. We all know the lyric is ‘Fuck Me Kitten’, and it was originally going to be listed as such on physical copies. But doing so would mean that a Parental Advisory label would have to be slapped onto the album covers. The word ‘fuck’ is said a few times in fellow album track ‘Ignoreland’. The band didn’t want this to happen, so they censored themselves using inspiration from The Rolling Stones’ ‘Star Star’. And as to what the song’s about, well, I’ve never come up with anything myself. But seeing the lyrics, it appears to be from the perspective of a narrator lamenting the end of a relationship, but still being enchanted by the other person that they want to have a casual get together every once in a while. That’s my deduced take for you.

#802: R.E.M. – Man on the Moon

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I downloaded the Automatic for the People album years ago. A website said that it was a very good record. I didn’t really pay much attention to it though. 2018 was the year I really got into R.E.M., and I went through the band’s whole discography in about two weeks. Automatic was an obvious standout. ‘Man on the Moon’ is the tenth track on there.

Drummer Bill Berry came up with the main chord progression of the verses (a slide from C to D) while strumming a guitar alongside the band’s usual guitarist, Peter Buck. The story goes that Berry reached for something and inadvertently changed the chord he was playing. Buck went ahead and developed upon the idea. Singer and lyricist Michael Stipe heard the music they had come up with, and for a long time had some trouble coming up with words to accompany it. In the end, he chose to write about comedian Andy Kaufman, his career highlights and compares those conspiracies about his death with those about the moon landing. The word ‘yeah’ also appears a lot in there because Stipe was inspired by Kurt Cobain’s use of it in Nirvana songs.

Notable highlights in this song for me are the three way harmonies of Stipe, bassist Mike Mills, and Berry. Those vocals were a staple in the R.E.M. catalogue from the band’s first album. After Automatic they weren’t utilised as much. Whenever that ‘Andy did you hear about this one’ pre-chorus starts with Berry on the lower harmony and Mills on the high with Stipe in the middle, it always feels like this huge change in motion from the preceding verses. Peter Buck’s slide guitar during these parts are quite nice too. Released as the second single from the album in 1992, it was part of a run that cemented the hold that R.E.M. had on the alternative world on the time. I’ll never really know how big the band were then. I hadn’t been born. But from what I’ve read, they were a huge deal.