‘Man On The Moon’ in the words of R.E.M.
One of the all-time great songs of the 1990s is, without doubt, ‘Man On The Moon’ from R.E.M.’s best-selling eighth studio album Automatic for the People, released in 1992. It’s a track that makes references to several historical events from across the ages and compiles them together in an assessment of the human belief system.
Michael Stipe once noted of the song: “We made a record called Automatic for the People in 1991/2 and we wrote this song called ‘Man On The Moon’.” Referring to some of the track’s opening lines, Stipe added: “Mott the Hoople, which most people watching probably wouldn’t know, but they famously recorded and had a giant hit with a David Bowie song called ‘All the Young Dudes’. Mott the Hoople and Andy Kaufmann landed on me as a fifteen-year-old, around the same time as punk rock.”
Mike Mills explained: “It’s a very strummy song, and it’s kinda washy and pushy and slushy as it moves along, and that’s what I like about it. Songs tend to tell you to go where they want as they go along. And you never know how they’re going to end up. One of the standout stems would have to be Peter’s slide guitar because it’s not something you heard on a lot of R.E.M. stuff if any. That’s kind of one of the secret weapons on this song.”
Stipe then said that he wasn’t “blowing smoke up” Mills’ ass, but “the most important part of this song for me is the bassline. It’s so powerful. When I feel lost in a track, I will anchor myself with the bass.” He added: “I was really bad at getting people to like clap along; it just felt so stupid to me. And at some point, I started kind of urging the audience to sing the ‘yeahs’ with us.”
Detailing further, Mills then explained R.E.M.’s writing process: “As with almost every R.E.M. song that we wrote, the music came first, and then we handed it to Michael to finish lyrically.” Stipe himself claimed to have been influenced by Kurt Cobain: “Nirvana had written a bunch of songs, Kurt had written a bunch of songs, with the word ‘yeah’ in them. And I, in a kind of joking way, decided that I was going to write a song that had more ‘yeahs’ in it than anything Kurt had ever written. And I did; I think I managed to do that. I think there are 54 ‘yeahs’ in the song.”
Elsewhere Mills noted: “The actual genesis of it was Bill Berry playing the guitar, and he played a C, slid it up to a D, and back down to a C, so the name on the demo was ‘C to D Slide’. Bill is a very good songwriter and had a lot of musical ideas, and then he and Peter fleshed the rest of it out musically.”
“It was a song that me and Peter and Bill really loved and had musically finished right at the end of recording and mixing,” Mills added. “It was almost the last day, if not the last day we were in the studio in Seattle. We’d been leaning on Michael very hard for some time to finish the song.” Stipe thought that the song was an instrumental, but Mills and the rest of the band insisted it was not. Mills told Stipe, “You need to finish it because it’s a story that needs to be told; whatever that story is, you need to tell it.”
Fortunately, Stipe did find the words to give the song its eternal resonance. “Michael worked very hard and came up with this beautiful lyric that encompasses doubt and belief and transition and conspiracy and truth. He sang it; we loved it.”
