‘Me in Honey’: When REM wrote a song about a topic nobody dreamed of covering
That REM achieved the success they did in the 1980s is a miracle. Not because they’re not one of the best American rock bands ever to be clear, but because they’re almost the complete opposite of what most would consider “an American rock band”, especially at the time. Stipe and co came of age as a band in the heyday of hair metal, yet not only was their music esoteric, artistic and deep, the members were too.
Bands like Poison and Bon Jovi lit up arenas with deafening riffs, pyro blasts and hairspray fumes. REM did so with chiming guitars and a singer so terrified of performing live, he would often spend entire sets with his back to the audience, mumbling through it. Yet, despite their work having a reputation for being impenetrable, most of the time, there’s pretty much always a theme or story that their songwriting can be drawn back to.
Case in point, the classic song from 1991’s Out of Time, ‘Me in Honey’. A song that can sound somewhat abstract on the surface, but the closer you look, the pieces start coming together. What’s more, if you look at the events that inspired the song, you’ll find an aspect of Michael Stipe’s personal life that you might not have expected.
You see, the song stems from Stipe’s close bond with 10,000 Maniacs frontwoman Natalie Merchant. The two bands spent a lot of time on the road together, and the two singers, in particular, developed a close bond. One that started as a friendship, then rather unexpectedly, became a romantic relationship, at least for a little while. It obviously didn’t stay that way for very long, but their friendship endures to this day, and has been an inspiration for both.
What inspired the REM song ‘Me in Honey’?
One of the 10,000 Maniacs’ songs that Stipe truly loved was their number, ‘Eat For Two’. The song is about how intensely hard and uncomfortable pregnancy is for a woman, and how easily one can fall into it if they’re not careful. Rather radically for a woman writing about pregnancy in the 1980s, Merchant described the song in a Spin interview as “a warning” more than anything else.
Stipe was fascinated by the song, as he should be. It’s an absolute classic with a fearlessness and viscerality that the slightly fey world of 1980s indie rock tended to shy away from. Thus, he was inspired to write a response to it. An “answer song”, as he explained to Marcus Gray in an interview conducted for his book It Crawled from the South: An REM Companion.
He said, “It’s a male perspective on pregnancy, which I don’t think has been dealt with. There’s a real push-me-pull-me issue, saying, ‘I had nothing to do with it’, yet on the other hand saying, ‘Wait, I have feelings about this.'” It would take a writer of pretty extraordinary tact and grace to write a song about the “male perspective on pregnancy” and have it not be a misogynistic excersise in speaking over women’s voices.
There are few better ways of describing Michael Stipe than a writer of tact and grace though, and ‘Me in Honey’ is a truly gorgeous song as a result.
