100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Drive

02 Try Not to Breathe

03 The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite

04 Everybody Hurts

05 New Orleans Instrumental No. 1

06 Sweetness Follows

07 Monty Got a Raw Deal

08 Ignoreland

09 Star Me Kittem

10 Man on the Moon

11 Nightswimming

12 Find the River

‘This record was a nine-month metamorphosis,’ said R.E.M.’s drummer Bill Berry. ‘It went from being a caterpillar to being a rat to being a dog to being a chicken. It went all over the place.’ In the beginning, guitarist Peter Buck (as ever) wanted to make a noisy rock album, but as the songs evolved the mood was increasingly introspective, even sombre. ‘The world that we’d been involved in had disappeared,’ said Buck. ‘The world of Hüsker Dü and the Replacements, all that had gone. We were just in a different place and that worked its way out musically and lyrically.’

In February ’92, when R.E.M. began recording their seventh album in Bearsville Studios, they were following up Out of Time, which had taken them from college rock darlings to international superstars. Ostensibly the new record had fewer pop songs, was more down-tempo but it turned out to be the highpoint – commercially and critically – of their career. ‘Out of Time and this one are not of a piece, really, but in mood they’re similar,’ said Buck. ‘Lyrically it’s dark and musically it’s oddball.’

As usual Buck, Berry and Mike Mills had worked up some 30 songs to which Michael Stipe later added words. ‘The stuff we were turning out was pretty dark,’ Buck told John O’Donnell at the time of the album’s release. ‘It wasn’t as if we gave Michael a bunch of pop songs and he wrote down these lyrics. Overall the record is pretty positive, but there are certain songs about death.’

Many of the songs reflect back to earlier times. ‘Nightswimming’, which Coldplay’s Chris Martin called ‘the greatest song ever written’, harked back to their college years in Athens, Georgia of late-night parties and skinny dipping. ‘Man in the Moon’ Buck described as ‘a funny little song about two people who are dead but are supposed to be alive: Elvis, and the comedian Andy Kaufman’. The song touches on death and fame and the games of youth. ‘Drive’, which references David Essex’s classic ‘Rock On’, is also addressed to ‘the kids’. It’s an elegiac song about rock & roll and what was then referred to as Generation X, and Stipe seems ambivalent about the whole circus. Strings arranged by Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones enhance that feeling.

Peter Buck was to get his one and only rock song with ‘Ignoreland’, but it is a firecracker, loading both barrels and firing them directly at the prevailing conservatism of the Reagan/Bush administration. Elsewhere, the track ‘The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight’ (based on the Tokens’ ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’) is not exactly rock but is at least up-tempo.

However, the real centrepiece of the album is ‘Everybody Hurts’. The song is about exactly what it says: when you’re at the depths of despair remember that you’re not alone and that this too will pass.

‘Bill brought it in, and it was a one-minute long country-and-western song,’ says Buck. ‘It didn’t have a chorus or a bridge … it went around and around, and he was strumming it. We went through about four different ideas and how to approach it and eventually came to that Stax, Otis Redding, “Pain in My Heart” vibe. I’m not sure if Michael would have copped that reference. It took us forever to figure out the arrangement and who was going to play what, and then Bill ended up not playing on the track. It was me and Mike and a drum machine.’ The downbeat optimism of ‘Everybody Hurts’ glues this disparate album together.

The title of the album clarifies the band’s intent. ‘There’s a soul food restaurant round here run by this really nice guy and that’s his slogan,’ said Buck. ‘When you order something, he goes, “It’s automatic!’’’ On Automatic for the People, R.E.M. were serving five-star soul food.