Buy it.
Love it.
Thank you R.E.M. for making me feel like the abused puppy at the shelter who finally got picked by a loving family. My heart is that happy!
I barely remember events that have occurred in the last week, but I can remember when every single R.E.M. album came out since grade school. One particular memory sticks with me. It was 1994, a Tuesday (natch), and I was in high school, taking the bus to school that morning. The cool neighbor boy (couldn’t avoid referring to him like that, ha ha) OWNED Monster. Already. It had just came out that day (those were the days people swarmed music stores at midnight the night before to get their hands on a cd). The bright orange and black cd cover was clutched in one of his hands. In the other, a silver SONY discman portable cd player. He was bopping his head to R.E.M’s “Bang and Blame” and “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” It was a jamming rock album from R.E.M. and It. Was. Epic. He let me grab his headphones and bounce around the rubberized bus seat for a few minutes…I was transplanted to a cool new world where the soundtrack made every scene beautiful.
The kind of excitement that comes with the release a new R.E.M. album can only be compared to when I used to look out my window the night before Christmas thinking if I stared long enough I would surely see Santa Claus glide through the sky. Eventhough I never saw the sleigh, it didn’t deter me. Year after year, I stared up at the sky for hours, convinced that I somehow must have blinked and missed the reindeer.
I love R.E.M. as much then as I do now. It is unrequited love, and, amazingly, the excitement has not faded as other things do with age, experience, and wisdom. (You can imagine how I felt when I found out the whole reindeer thing was, well… you know)
R.E.M. has remained Epic.
They still rock my world and provide a cool soundtrack to my life. They still transplant me to someplace awesome, 17 years later.
Thanks Michael and the gang, you never disappoint!
