At the peak of their fame, R.E.M. followed a global smash with its opposite — twelve hushed, string-laden songs about mortality, with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones writing the strings — and then refused to tour a note of it.
At the peak of their fame, R.E.M. followed a global smash by making its opposite: twelve quiet, string-laden songs about mortality, cut in 1992 across five American studios with Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones writing the string parts — and then refused to tour a note of it. Automatic for the People sold in the tens of millions anyway, and is the record most people mean when they say R.E.M.
R.E.M.'s eighth studio album, released in October 1992 — the follow-up to the breakthrough Out of Time, and a deliberate turn away from it. Twelve mostly slow, autumnal songs about death, memory and America on the turn, recorded in New Orleans, upstate New York, Miami, Atlanta and Seattle with producer Scott Litt and string arrangements by John Paul Jones. The band declined to tour it. It became their most beloved record.
By 1992 R.E.M. were, improbably, one of the biggest bands in the world. Out of Time, released in March 1991, had spun 'Losing My Religion' into a global hit and made a decade-old college-rock act from Athens, Georgia into a mainstream fixture. The obvious next move was a loud, triumphant rock record — and that is what the band, by their own account, set out to make. What came instead was Automatic for the People: hushed, string-heavy, preoccupied with death, and almost entirely without the up-tempo songs they had planned. Guitarist Peter Buck later put the mood down to something as ordinary as turning thirty; whatever the cause, the four of them kept reaching for the slow, sad songs and letting the fast ones go.
The record was built the way the band now worked — in pieces, across the country. Early demos were cut at Daniel Lanois's Kingsway studio in New Orleans in February 1992; the bulk of the recording ran from spring at Bearsville, near Woodstock in upstate New York, with overdubs at Criteria in Miami and sessions at Bosstown in Atlanta, string recording near home at John Keane's studio in Athens, and mixing at Bad Animals in Seattle. Scott Litt, co-producing with the band as he had since the mid-1980s, and engineer Clif Norrell held the thing together across the map. The geographic sprawl never shows: the album sounds like one long, coherent dusk.
Its defining decision was to bring in strings, and to bring in the right person to write them. R.E.M. asked John Paul Jones — Led Zeppelin's bassist and, crucially, the arranger behind that band's orchestral moments — to score four tracks: 'Drive', 'The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite', 'Everybody Hurts' and 'Nightswimming'. Jones wrote for fourteen players, most of them from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, conducted by George Hanson. The strings are never lush for their own sake; on 'Nightswimming' they arrive late and open the song into something enormous, and on 'Everybody Hurts' they lift a deliberately plain three-chord ballad — written, Buck said, so simply that a teenager could learn it — into the anthem that would outlast everything around it.
The songs are a catalogue of loss handled without melodrama. 'Try Not to Breathe' is sung in the voice of an old person choosing to die; 'Sweetness Follows' is a dirge about burying parents, scraped raw by a bowed-cello drone. 'Man on the Moon', the album's warmest moment, is a tribute to the comedian Andy Kaufman that turns his hoaxes and his faked-death rumours into a meditation on belief itself — Stipe wrote the lyric under deadline pressure in the final sessions, and it later lent its name to Miloš Forman's 1999 Kaufman biopic. 'Nightswimming', all but a solo — Mike Mills at the piano, a single vocal, Jones's strings — was inspired by skinny-dipping after Athens shows, and was played on the historic Criteria piano used on Derek and the Dominos' 'Layla'. Only 'Ignoreland', a spitting attack on twelve years of Reagan and Bush, raises its voice.
R.E.M. then did the thing no band at their commercial altitude does: they refused to tour. There was no road show, no arena run to convert the album's success into the usual victory lap — a silence so total that it helped feed a persistent, false rumour that Michael Stipe was dying of AIDS. The songs went to work without them. 'Everybody Hurts', with its plain-spoken plea against suicide and its Athens-traffic-jam video, became a genuine standard, reached for at funerals and after disasters; the album drew four Grammy nominations for the 1994 ceremony, including Album of the Year, and 'Everybody Hurts' swept the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards.
Automatic for the People is not in our hundred, and the reason is simply that the hundred is closed. By almost any other measure it is R.E.M.'s masterpiece and one of the essential records of the 1990s — the album where the biggest alternative band in the world answered the grunge that Nevermind had just unleashed not by getting louder but by getting quieter and older, and dared to make a mainstream blockbuster out of mandolins, cellos and death. It reached number two in America and number one in Britain and has sold somewhere around eighteen million copies. Nearly every one of them was bought by someone who wanted to sit still with it, alone, which is exactly how it was made to be heard.
Because Automatic for the People sold in the millions, the game here is not scarcity but which of the many cheap copies is the good one. The consensus among collectors is that the 1992 US pressing (Warner Bros. 9 45055-1), cut using Direct Metal Mastering, is the one to be wary of — DMM copies are widely judged the weakest-sounding of the originals. The vintage pressing to chase is instead the 1992 UK/European issue (Warner Bros. 9362-45055-1, order number WX 488), pressed in Germany at WMME Alsdorf and identifiable by the etched 'WMME Alsdorf' and '936 245055-1' in the runout; both matte and glossy cover variants exist. For sound with none of the guesswork, the 2017 Craft Recordings 25th-anniversary reissue (catalogue CR00046), remastered from the original analogue tapes by the album's own mastering engineer Stephen Marcussen and pressed on 180g, is the reference modern cut. No official half-speed master exists, so ignore any listing claiming one. And note the collectible non-vinyl tell: the earliest CDs and cassettes shipped in a translucent yellow tray/shell before the switch to black.
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