“I’ve always despised love songs, so I had to try them,” said Michael Stipe in an interview with the New York Times in 1991. “To me, ‘Out Of Time’ is a record of challenges, after our eleven-month tour ended in 1989 and it came time to write the new album, Peter (Buck) didn’t want to look at an electric guitar, much less play one. Since everyone in the band is something of a multi-instrumentalist, they chose to move over to instruments that were unusual to them.”
Stipe’s words set the scene for R.E.M.’s seventh album and indicate the change that the record paved the way for. Having signed to Warner Bros in 1988 the band received international exposure following their first release on the label, ‘Green’; an extensive tour was followed by a year break. The success gave them the impetus to move away from the fringes of American college radio and into mainstream focus.
Musically the record is in keeping with the experimentation that had been hinted at in ‘Green’ and included cameos from rapper KRS-One on ‘Radio Song’ and B-52’s singer Kate Pierson on three tracks, including ‘Shiny Happy People’. These appearances were run alongside instrumental changes that also witnessed the introduction of everything from string sections to harpsichords. Contextually, ‘Out Of Time’ is a continuation of the trajectory that ‘Green’ began – it is an extension, and maturity, of the experimental nature of its predecessor.
Lyrically Stipe completely changed his landscape: no longer were his words centred around the anti-conservative, pro-environmental nature which had embodied the band’s anti-Reagan stance during the ’80s with tracks like ‘Orange Crush’ and ‘World Leader Pretend’. For this album, Stipe tried something he’d never attempted before – love songs. Singing with a new found clarity the lyrics pushed the unwilling frontman further into the spotlight than he’d ever been in his career and his words conveyed that emotion. Barring two tracks on the record every one is sang in first person and the connection he achieves through ballads like ‘Half A World Away’ (“This could be the saddest dusk I’ve ever seen”) and ‘Country Feedback’ (“I need this / It’s crazy what you could have had”) were the rawest works he’d penned to date. Incidentally the latter is Stipe’s favourite R.E.M. song and was reportedly improvised from a letter he wrote, but never sent, to an ex-lover.
I have deliberately left out any mention of what is undoubtedly the main reason for ‘Out Of Time’ being the record that cemented R.E.M.’s international status – the first single from the album: ‘Losing My Religion’. Directly responsible for two of the three Grammys that R.E.M. received that year, the track became the band’s biggest hit on the US Billboard, reaching number four. To put that into perspective Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, their highest charting single, came out in the same year and reached number six.
Both tracks represented movements away from stale soft rock which was stubbornly refusing to leave the public arena. It’s a testament to their quality that both ‘Losing My Religion’ and ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ feature in Rolling Stone’s ‘500 Greatest Songs Of All Time’ – by far the most successful track of that year, Bryan Adams’ ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’, is now nothing more than a denim nightmare. Let us learn from our mistakes – never trust a man who sings with Spice Girls.
Words by Sam Ballard
R.E.M. – ‘Out Of Time’
PRODUCERS: SCOTT LITT/R.E.M.
MUSICIANS: MICHAEL STIPE – VOCALS, MELODICA; PETER BUCK – GUITARS, MANDOLIN; MIKE MILLS – BASS, VOCALS. HARPSICHORD, KEYBOARDS; BILL BERRY – DRUMS, PERCUSSION, PIANO, BASS, VOCALS
TRACKLIST
1. ‘RADIO SONG’
2. ‘LOSING MY RELIGION’
3. ‘LOW’
4. ‘NEAR WILD HEAVEN’
5. ‘ENDGAME’
6. ‘SHINY HAPPY PEOPLE’
7. ‘BELONG’
8. ‘HALF A WORLD AWAY’
9. ‘TEXARKANA’
10. ‘COUNTRY FEEDBACK’
11. ‘ME IN HONEY’
1991: In The News
– RODNEY KING BEATEN BY POLICE IN L.A.
– GORBACHEV OVERSEES THE DISSOLUTION OF THE SOVIET UNION
– THE WARSAW RADIO MAST, THE WORLD’S TALLEST STRUCTURE, COLLAPSES.
– FREDDIE MERCURY DIES.
1991: The Albums
DE LA SOUL – ‘DE LA SOUL IS DEAD’
MERCURY REV – ‘YERSELF IS STEAM’
CYPRESS HILL – ‘CYPRESS HILL’
BLUR – ‘LEISURE’
