“It can touch so many people”: The most meaningful REM song, according to Mike Mills
Over the course of 40 years, REM barely ever took their foot off the gas and were seemingly able to produce one spectacular album after another. Some people might look at the alternative rock icons from Georgia and say they were at their best in the earliest years. In contrast, others might prefer their commercially successful period in the 1990s. Still, they never really had anything that could truly be considered lacklustre – even if some records aren’t up to their lofty standards.
From 1983 to 1988, they released an album a year, each one further cementing them as one of the great bands of the era. After the release of Green, which had been their most commercially successful album to date with songs like ‘Stand’ and ‘Orange Crush’ becoming radio hits, they finally took a break between albums, only to come out with the equally successful Out of Time and their opus, Automatic For the People in 1991 and 1992 respectively. This unstoppable nature of the band means that there is so much to celebrate, even in just the first half of their career, and even in the latter part, there are moments of splendour.
At the heart of the group was frontman Michael Stipe, an incredibly talented lyricist and songwriter who drove the band towards success from their humble beginnings. However, that doesn’t negate the contributions made by the band’s other three members, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills and original drummer Bill Berry, who left the band in 1997. Their input to the band’s music was just as valuable as Stipe’s, and their incredible musicianship was a huge factor in the constant evolution and development of the band’s sound.
One might argue that REM tended to be a little serious, and because Stipe’s lyrics were often oblique and hard to decipher, people mistook them for being morose. However, there are plenty of moments in REM’s catalogue that are uplifting and easy to relate to, and even amid the labyrinthine poetry that Stipe penned, he would occasionally lay everything bare and pour his heart out.
The record that features some of the finest examples of this just so happens to be Automatic For the People, their most critically acclaimed release. While there are moments of humour and lightheartedness, particularly in songs like ‘Man on the Moon’ and ‘The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite’, there are splashes of heartbreak and tenderness to be found on gems like ‘Nightswimming’, ‘Star Me Kitten’, and the song that Mills calls the most meaningful track the band ever wrote, ‘Everybody Hurts’.
When asked by Vulture in 2023 what the REM song with “the most heart” in it was, he said that ‘Everybody Hurts’ may have been the most obvious answer, but it was hard to argue with it due to how universal its themes of despair and grief are. “It can touch so many people so deeply,” Mills argued. “When we write songs, generally speaking, we don’t know what Michael’s going to do with them. We write songs that we, as musicians, enjoy and then give them to Michael. So we had no idea what ‘Everybody Hurts’ would become.
However, the song didn’t always have this crushing tone to it, and the three musicians said that when they initially conceived the track, it amused them far more than when Stipe added his lyrics. “We actually laughed a little bit while recording it because it has that silly little drum-machine sound,” Mills explained. “We thought that was funny. I remember putting the electric piano on there and thinking it was a really cool sound. It’s nice when you can work an electric piano into a song.”
