Michael Stipe on the one R.E.M. song he “didn’t want to record”
Throughout their 30-year career, R.E.M. gained a reputation for being difficult to decipher. Whether they were trying to explain their name or getting grilled on Michael Stipe’s iconic vocal delivery, the Athens alternative rock legends often found themselves in the position of trying to explain what they were doing. Especially in the band’s first decade, specific meanings and intentions were often lost in translation or simply misunderstood. No song in their catalogue was more emblematic of this than ‘The One I Love’.
Originally recorded during the sessions for their 1987 album Document, ‘The One I Love’ quickly took on a life of its own when it became R.E.M.’s first top ten hit in the US, peaking at number nine in December of 1987. The song propelled R.E.M. from being one of the best-known “college rock” bands to becoming a mainstream arena rock juggernaut. According to Stipe, that was built on the back of most audiences not realising the true intentions behind the song’s lyrics.
“It’s probably better that they think it’s a love song at this point. That song just came up from somewhere and I recognized it as being really violent and awful,” Stipe told Q magazine in 1992. “But it wasn’t directed at any one person. I would never write a song like that. Even if there was one person in the world thinking, ;This song is about me,’ I could never sing it or put it out… I didn’t want to record that, I thought it was too much. Too brutal. I think there’s enough of that ugliness around.”
The basics of ‘The One I Love’ started out with R.E.M.’s usual writing process. Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Bill Berry came up with the song’s basic structure during a writing session, and the song remained an instrumental until Stipe came in to add lyrics and melody. Mills recognised the song as being something different the second that Buck arrived with the riff.
“I remember Peter, showing me that riff and thinking it was pretty cool, and then the rest of the song flowed from there,” Mills recalled to Uncut. “We played the whole song as an instrumental until Michael came up with some vocals for it.”
Still, even when the song opened up doors for the band, Stipe wasn’t eager about it’s success. “I didn’t like the song to begin with,” Stipe told Mojo Magazine in 2016. “I felt it was too brutal. I thought the sentiment was too difficult to put out into the world. But people misunderstood it, so it was fine. Now it’s a love song, so that’s fine.”
Check out ‘The One I Love’ down below.
