Real ethereal: The beautiful bridge construction of REM’s ‘Star Me Kitten’
While the band themselves were enjoying the most commercially successful period of their career, the REM fan base was starting to fracture a tad in the early 1990s.
The deadly serious, heart-on-the-sleeve radio hits ‘Losing My Religion’ and ‘Everybody Hurts’ had opened the band’s tent up to the masses, but for some fans who’d latched on to REM’s more frenetic and mysterious sound in the 1980s, this new perception of their favourite indie rock group felt like a case of mistaken identity.
Fortunately, whether you were more of a ‘Nightswimming’ person or an ‘Ignoreland’ fan, 1992’s Automatic for the People did seem to bridge the gap between the two eras of the band, which is one of the reasons it’s typically recognised among REM’s best efforts. And we’re not even just talking about bridges in the metaphorical sense.
Sometimes the bridge or “middle eight” of a pop song can reset the vibe and bring in some call-and-response, like in OutKast’s ‘Hey-Ya’. Other times it can have the effect of inserting a completely different song and singer into a piece, as with The Beatles ‘A Day in the Life’. More times than not, though, it’s just an opportunity to find another point of view on the melody that’s already been established, dragging it through the dirt or lifting it to the clouds to create something that feels more vibrant and three-dimensional than a traditional, variance-free folk song structure.
REM were always highly capable bridge builders going back to their earliest days, from the jittering middle eight of ‘Harborcoat’ and twangy side-jaunt of ‘Driver 8’ to Mike Mills’s plaintive vocal aside on ‘Fall On Me’. Maybe the loveliest bridge in the band’s whole catalogue can be found on Automatic for the People, in the middle of one of the album’s otherwise less celebrated tracks, ‘Star Me Kitten’.
A slow-burning song about carnal desire sung in more of an old school Michael Stipe whisper-mumble, backed by a gentle Hammond organ, tremolo guitar, and some overdubbed, slightly ghostly Mike Mills backing “awwws”, ‘Star Me Kitten’ was never going to be a breakout single or a big encore number on tour.
The song, coming right after the up-tempo ‘Ignoreland’ on the record, effectively drops the listener into a hazy trance. As such, when the bridge comes in at the one-minute-35-second mark, it has a borderline euphoric effect, elevated by the organ rising like a church sermon and Stipe stepping outside of the song’s story to get briefly existential: “Have we lost our minds? Will this never end? It could depend on your take”.
The whole thing comes and goes in about 30 seconds, as if Stipe had walked out to the balcony, looked up at the heavens, then ducked back into his dark hotel room.
The bridge is both beautiful and ever-so-slightly unnerving, capturing a David Lynch vibe that everybody in REM seemed to notice as well, as Peter Buck later described ‘Star Me Kitten’ as a “Frank Booth-type love song”, referring to Dennis Hopper’s character in Blue Velvet.
Because Mills’ backing vocals were constructed from layering over his performances of each different note, the ghost-choir effect was extremely difficult to recreate on stage, meaning the bridge never quite sounded the same way twice. On the record, though, it remains a little piece of perfection, uniting the various tribes of REM devotees at a midway point in the group’s career.
