My Top 5 R.E.M. Songs

I'm a white GenX Midwesterner, of course I have 5 favorite R.E.M. songs

Photo: A derivative work by CityFeedback, from a variety of images credited above, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The other day the journalist and author Luke O’Neil published an article in which he asked a number of other writers for their favorite R.E.M. songs. I thought this was a great idea and, since I’m me, I couldn’t resist playing along.

I grew up amidst the Iowa cornfields during the hair-metal era. Hair metal is, by a considerable margin, my least favorite genre of music. Therefore R.E.M. was important to adolescent me because it was rock music that my parents didn’t listen to and the radio didn’t play. And my list is going to lean very heavily on my adolescent years, because if you don’t love the music you listened to as a teen for the rest of your life, you never loved it in the first place, it was just popular.

So don’t be shocked when I tell you my favorite R.E.M. albums are, in order, Lifes Rich Pageant, Green, and Monster. Yes, Monster, not Automatic for the People.

Anyway, counting down from 5 to 1.

Number 5: “So. Central Rain”

A sentimental favorite, if only because it was the first R.E.M. song I remember hearing. Everything one might associate with the band is right here in this song: an airy melody, counterpoint backing vocals, surprisingly complicated chord structure, shifting between major and minor, and really good bass playing that manages not to call attention too much attention to itself.

Number 4: “Nightswimming”

Possibly the only R.E.M. song that could be called “sweet” and one of only a couple that centers around piano instead of guitar. An elegiac look at the awkward moments and amazing experiences of adolescence. I probably would have appreciated it more had I not been almost 21 when it came out. It’s always made me wonder if this piano-based thing was something they ought to have explored more.

Number 3: “Swan Swan H”

Is this even one of the better songs on Lifes Rich Pageant? Plenty of R.E.M. fans would call it — and have called it — forgettable. They must have stronger brains than I do because this song falls into my head at least twice a week, and it has for almost forty years now. There’s only one other R.E.M. song that does that, and I put it at Number 1.

Peter Buck’s guitar work on this song isn’t technically difficult. None of his guitar work is. He’s the Ringo Starr of the guitar. If you think that’s an insult, you don’t know how important Ringo was to The Beatles. A more ambitious drummer would have wrecked everything. And a more “look at me” guitarist would have ruined many R.E.M. songs, but Peter Buck didn’t ruin a one. As is so often the case with this band, though, I haven’t a clue what this song is about.

Number 2: I Remember California

Most people would expect a song called “I Remember California” to be sunny, cheerful, filled with surfers and beach bunnies and glamour. Not this song, an ode to broken dreams and disillusionment. I’d kill to write just one line as good as “Nearly-was and almost-rans.” That’s a whole Bukowski story right there. Los Angeles attracts ambitious people who quickly find out how unique they aren’t.

Lowering and threatening, driven by some of Bill Berry’s best drumming and Mike Mill’s typically strained backing vocals, this is one of the heaviest and darkest things R.E.M. ever recorded. But for me the ultimate musical moment is the last line of the last verse, “I remember this … this …” That second “this” is a clashing, hanging note that your ear desperately wants to resolve … and it just … doesn’t resolve. You’ve got to be very ballsy musically to pull that off.

Number 1: The Flowers of Guatemala

I love this song on so many levels and for so many reasons. First of all, it’s just gorgeous and soothing. If you never dug any deeper, well, you wouldn’t have to. Just enjoy the pretty song.

But this was the first song I hacked. 23-year-old me couldn’t handle not being able to play this song on the guitar, so I messed around until I figured the whole thing out, starting with the ethereal picking pattern that starts the song off. From there it was just a matter of discovering that the chords in the chorus are the same chords used in “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane.” And the guitar solo, so simple, so plaintive, and yet so filled with emotion, can be played on one string (and probably was). The organ chords behind that solo take up another level. The drumming is a direct crib from Ringo, showing that Bill Berry knew what not to reinvent.

Then there are the lyrics, about visiting Guatemala, finding peace and contentment and these weirdly beautiful flowers that bloom at night. “Amanita is their name, the flowers cover everything …”

Except Amanita are not flowers. They’re a genus of mushrooms, some of which (like the fly agaric, a/k/a the “Mario mushroom”) are psychedelic but more of which are poisonous. The best known of the latter is Amanita phalloides, popularly known as the death-cap. If you eat half of one, that’s enough to kill you.

There are flowers over everything. There are deadly mushrooms over everything. This song, as the band has repeatedly confirmed, is about genocide in Guatemala and the U.S.’s complicity in it. The flowers are planted on graves. The mushrooms spring up during the tropical nights. This song is about death lurking just below a beautiful, placid surface — and it literally has death buried beneath its beautiful, placid surface.

It’s brilliant songwriting, the sort of stuff you used to read about artists behind the Iron Curtain having to do in order to sneak it past the censors, except this happened in plain sight in Reagan’s America.

And it’s still breathtakingly beautiful.