The group had the makings of a perfect album trilogy if the last one hadn’t fallen short
In 1997, R.E.M.’s drummer Bill Berry announced he was leaving the band to retire to his farm in Watkinsville, Georgia. He had been one of the founding members and had been instrumental in R.E.M.’s growth from college radio favorite to multi-platinum record sales. Fans may have assumed that the group would disband, as band members had vowed if any of the four departed, but singer Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck and bassist Mike Mills were not ready to give it up just yet. They were preparing to record their first album under a renewed $80 million, five record deal with Warner Bros., and the new music they were working on had recharged their creative energy. R.E.M. would carry on with the three remaining members, and their next three albums would test their decision making, their ability to work together as a band, and their friendship. In the press release for Berry’s departure, Michael Stipe wrote, “For me, Mike and Peter, as R.E.M., are we still R.E.M.? I guess a three-legged dog is still a dog. It just has to learn how to run differently.”
The three albums, Up (1998), Reveal (2001) and Around the Sun (2004) would share some similarities. First off, a new producer, Pat McCarthy, replaced long-time producer Scott Litt, who had been with the band since 1987’s Document. McCarthy came on board as an engineer for 1996’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and he would produce the next three records with the band members. Next was the music. It introduced electronics into their sound: synths, drum machines, loops, sequencing, odd sound effects—-they all found a place in these records. These new musical elements inspired Stipe, Buck, and Mills to explore new songwriting possibilities in their music and the resulting songs that filled these discs are slow to mid-tempo tracks, many with captivating melodies. I have always thought of these albums as R.E.M.’s “Beach Boys Trilogy,” because of their musical creativity and a style that recalls Brian Wilson’s arrangements on his group’s albums from 1966 to 1971 (Pet Sounds through Surf’s Up), with some tracks that unapologetically borrow from the master songwriter/arranger. Peter Buck and Mike Mills were never shy about expressing their appreciation for The Beach Boys (Buck wrote liner notes for a CD reissue of The Beach Boys Love You), and during this period, they tapped into the Brian Wilson influence more than ever.
One less flattering aspect these albums share is that they continued the group’s domestic album sales decline. R.E.M.’s record sales peaked with Out of Time (1991) and Automatic for the People (1992), and each subsequent release would sell less than the previous one in their home country. Globally, though, the group was more popular than ever, and Up, Reveal, and Around the Sun, along with album singles, topped the charts in the U.K. and Europe. Since the group’s debut LP Murmur, in 1983, the opposite had been true, with each new record outselling the last one, slowly moving them from indie cult to an arena rock band, driven by hits like “The One I Love,” “Losing My Religion,” “Everybody Hurts,” and “Man on the Moon.” R.E.M. would shift between blazing rock albums and slower, melodic records, never staying in a single mode for more than a few releases. Out of Time and Automatic for the People are their most popular and best-selling albums, both with a slow to mid-tempo format, but R.E.M.’s return to this style for the “trilogy” did not touch the heart of the American record buying public as it had before. Up and Reveal would barely claw their way over Murmur’s initial domestic sales, and Around the Sun became R.E.M.’s worst selling record at that point.
Bill Berry’s departure had more of an impact than probably anyone initially realized. R.E.M. had been a tight, cohesive unit dating back to their early days in Athens, Georgia. Peter Buck and Michael Stipe met at a record store, and Mike Mills and Bill Berry were friends from Macon, who moved to Athens in 1979 to attend the University of Georgia. All four were under the spell of punk rock and after they met and began practicing together, they quickly realized they had the making of an arresting band. Mills and Berry had previously played in bands in Macon and Buck and Stipe, who were living in a converted church, had already begun writing songs. R.E.M. played their first gig at the church for a few hundred people in 1980 and before long they were the hottest band in town, mostly playing sixties covers with a few originals. Bill Berry had the strongest business sense, booking the band’s early shows, and through his connection with Ian Copeland—brother of Miles Copeland of I.R.S. Records and Stewart Copeland of The Police—they began playing larger gigs, opening for Gang of Four, The English Beat and The Police. In May 1982, they signed to I.R.S. Records and released the EP Chronic Town. Rolling Stone named Murmur Album of the Year in 1983.
Bill Berry and Peter Buck kept R.E.M. focused, moving their recordings along rapidly by not getting too bogged down in the details. Michael Stipe and Mike Mills were the perfectionists. Stipe wrote the lyrics and the other three handled the music, and with Berry’s departure, the established process of creating the new songs for Up became incredibly arduous. The lyrics usually came at the end, after the music was completed, and Stipe was experiencing extreme writer’s block. While Buck, Mills and McCarthy waited, they began toying with the music and remixing the completed tracks. As Up’s recording dragged on, the new mixes were not to everyone’s liking, and at one point, communication broke down and they stopped speaking to each other. Michael later told The Big Takeover, “It was tremendously difficult. In fact, when we first started the record, we weren’t getting along, we were having a lot of problems communicating, trying to figure out what to do now.” The mood was dark, and it could have closed the book on R.E.M. for good. Finally, a meeting was arranged in a remote Idaho hideout for the three band members to air out their anger and grievances. It was exactly what the group needed to buckle up and finish the record. And become a band of brothers again.
For all the turmoil in making Up, the finished album is exceptional. Several tracks are stunning, and “At My Most Beautiful,” complete with Beach Boys-like backing vocals and sleigh bells, may be the most gorgeous song R.E.M. ever recorded. The first single, “Daysleeper” is also a gem, with its sad and lonesome lyrics, and “Diminished” is another track that carries a Brian Wilson presence. Up is equally weird and beautiful and is unlike any R.E.M. album they had previously made. “It was like a couple of people playing random instruments to drum machines or tape loops,” Buck told The Big Takeover. “I think the reason the record company picked the first single to be “Daysleeper” is that it’s the only thing that sounds vaguely like anything we’ve done in the past.” Bill Berry was also impressed with what they accomplished without him. In an interview for the TV show VH1: Behind the Music, he quipped, “When I heard it, I felt like a chump. I quit and they make their best record.”
The band had worked through their issues with Up and the same disagreements and challenges were not present when making Reveal. No writer’s block and, overall, a pleasant recording experience. Reveal is a dazzling record with summer themed songs, and you can feel the heat on your neck and visualize evening walks by the shore in Stipe’s descriptive lyrics. “Summer Turns to High” and “Beachball” keeps the Beach Boys ingredients intact, the latter enhanced with Burt Bacharach flugelhorns. Lush and elegant, Reveal is another beauty, with a wonderful Michael Stipe vocal performance, and he was quick to call Reveal the group’s best work. I must admit, Reveal is one of my favorite R.E.M. albums and I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the music when I first bought the compact disc. Established bands that are twenty-plus years in are generally not expected to make such high caliber albums.
The slower songs had worked perfectly for Up and Reveal, so a third album with a comparable group of tracks should have had equal results. That might have been the case if the recording hadn’t gone off the rails. R.E.M. began work on Around the Sun in late 2002, and by early 2003, they had no finished tracks and a case of too many songs and too many ideas. They would then make a critical mistake. In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003 was scheduled to be released and the band stopped work on the new album to tour the “best of” record. Two up-tempo songs from the Around the Sun sessions, “Bad Day” and “Animal,” were quickly completed so they could be added to In Time. In hindsight, these tracks may have been better served on Around the Sun. The tour in Europe and America lasted until the end of 2003 and R.E.M. was not back in the recording studio again until January 2004. What followed next was six months in the studio, endlessly playing with the tracks, unsure of how to put it together as a cohesive piece. “What happened, number one, is that we weren’t really talking,” Stipe told The Big Takeover. “And we’d lost our focus, because we started the album and then we decided to release a greatest hits, and we poached the two howling and primitive songs from the album we were making, and put them on the best-of, which was “Animal” and “Bad Day.” And then gosh, that was really fun, so we made videos for those, and that was fun and then we’ll tour. It was really nothing so kind of laid out and calculated as it might seem. So we toured that record and then went back to making the album. So this album was stretched out over a year and a half, and it became a really different thing.” Peter Buck was more biting with his comments. “Not to dwell on it, but Around the Sun was a disaster in every way. God, it was horrible to work on! It went on forever, and it’s not a record anyone wants to listen to, including us. We learned our lesson about that—don’t stretch it out forever, don’t rethink it, which is the way I like to work, anyway.”
In keeping with The Beach Boys comparisons, Around the Sun could be considered R.E.M.’s Smile. Brian Wilson wanted Smile to be an epic creation, but he recorded too much music, spent too much time in it, and he got lost in the process. Wilson eventually abandoned Smile, only to finish it and release it several decades later. R.E.M. probably should have scrapped Around the Sun and started over again from scratch. There are some good songs on the album, “Leaving New York,” “Final Straw,” and a personal favorite, “High Speed Train,” but most of the tracks on Around the Sun are dull and flat. “Bad Day” and “Animal” could have steered the record in a difference direction, using a mix of styles like they would do successfully a few years later on Collapse into Now. The band members knew they had made their least appealing record, releasing Around the Sun with cover artwork that showed three out-of-focus characters.
R.E.M. redeemed themselves with their next album, Accelerate, a rock record like Monster, which had followed Automatic for the People. They went back to the process they knew best, and it was a critical success, although not so much with record sales. “During the protracted Around the Sun sessions,” John Everhart wrote in The Big Takeover, “they violated the pragmatic ‘first-thought/best-thought’ edict often espoused by guitarist Peter Buck, and relegated any dissonant touches he may have lent to the sidelines.” New producer Jacknife Lee steered R.E.M.’s last two albums, leaving the band to call it quits on a high note and on their own terms in 2011. Right before sessions for Accelerate began, the group recorded a live album from five dates in Dublin, Ireland. R.E.M. Live features six songs from Around the Sun with other uptempo songs from their past albums. Hearing these songs mixed with the others gives the listener a different perspective on what Around the Sun could have been. In his book, Perfect Circle: The Story of R.E.M., Tony Fletcher concludes the miscues in Around the Sun when he wrote, “Never had they spent so long tinkering with one set of songs; never would they do so again.”