REM

REM breaking up after 30 years feels to me like an old couple getting a divorce. Aftergoing through all the hard parts (Bill leaving the band, making albums without being in the studio together, not really talking to each other during the Around the Sun era), they suddenly get all chummy and happy again over the last three years. And now they break up? Why didn't you just split up after Reveal and spare us the last three albums? Now the kids are grown up and out of the house...BOOM! Your father and I are splitting up even though these last few years without you in the house are the best we've ever had. No, we will not be getting together with the family for festival season. In the winter of our lives, we will start new families across the country from each other, but we hope you still love us because we love you and we still love each other. A strange currency indeed.

I wore an REM hat every day junior year. Every five days I coupled it with my New Adventures in HiFi shirt. By the end of the year the shirt had pit stains and the black hat turned brown from the sun and dirt. I woke up for a month to How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us.

It was through REM that I learned about bands selling out from Jake Robertson. Apparently, they sold out when they signed with Warner Brothers before I even knew they existed. I had a hard time accepting that as it was all in the past for me and Green was my first REM album. I still don't understand how anyone can consider Green in its entirety as a sellout album. I can see maybe Stand as a sellout song and later Shiny Happy People.

I've never loved Out of Time. I don't know if I ever really loved an entire REM album front to back like I have a Radiohead or U2 album. No, that's no true, I loved Green fiercely. Even Automatic, I couldn't take Everybody Hurts and Man on the Moon soon bored me. But while their albums may have not been perfect, each album had perfect moments which is why I always returned to them. And they were usually just album tracks that killed me. Leave, Be Mine, Country Feedback, Sweetness Follows, Low, etc.

They always felt like a band that lived a double life. No ever played any of their early stuff in the radio like they did with U2 so when Eric Jacobson bought all of their early albums and played them for me, it rattled my bones. I was so used to the well-produced albums that I didn't know what to think. I felt old listening to Fables, like I was growing mold or moss on me as I listened. And that's why I love Fables more than any album save Green.