The one REM album Michael Stipe couldn’t live without: “My absolute favourite”
REM didn’t fly out of the traps as the finished article, but they had the luxury of time to grow and develop with each record before eventually hitting their artistic peak.
All it takes is to have a look at the listings of your local decent-sized venue to realise how many prominent bands are still living off their debut album, playing it in full for whatever loose anniversary they’ve managed to tie it to.
While it’s financially lucrative, no artist wants to accept that their best body of work was their first record, and it’s all been downhill since. In a dream world, every band would like an arc like REM, who took until their seventh album, Music for the People, to truly hit the big time.
By this point, REM already had a decade of experience under their belt, giving them the experience and maturity to deal with the exposure. Rather than crumbling, they continued to improve further, which feels like an alien story in today’s music industry.
At every step, REM never shied away from innovation and doing things differently. Even when they’ve reunited since their 2011 split, it has been a surprise appearance in their hometown, Athens, Georgia, at a tiny venue and Songwriters Hall of Fame, rather than a cash-grabbing Las Vegas residency.
Their ethos, from the start, has always seen REM embrace their weirdness, rather than trying to serve up what they believe people might want to hear from a chart-topping rock band. Admittedly, their output declined during their latter years, which is why they called it quits, but for a few years, they were untouchable.
From a commercial standpoint, 1996’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi was the peak of the band’s popularity, selling over seven million copies. However, gold discs don’t always correlate with quality, but in the opinion of their singer, Michael Stipe, it’s comfortably the best album REM ever made.
Musically, New Adventures in Hi-Fi saw REM embrace folk. Intriguingly, rather than record the album in a traditional studio setting over an allotted time period, they instead chose to make the LP in different locations while they were touring across the United States.
While this unconventional move could have backfired, it had the opposite effect. Instead, the bold decision injected an unmistakable energy into the album, which could only be achieved from living on the road. Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke once named it as the record which changed his life, highlighting the seismic impact of New Adventures in Hi-Fi on the musical landscape.
During an interview with Kyle Meredith, Stipe explained how touring shaped the sound of the album, reflecting: “That infusion, I think, is profoundly important because you can really feel it in the tracks, what these guys were doing. We were in a hyper adrenalised state being on tour performing every night, or every other night, and you feel that in the music. It creates this bristling landscape for me with the narrative arcs and the characters I invented.”
Stipe then shared his belief that it’s REM’s best work, adding, “It remains my favourite REM album. It remains my favourite out of any record that we made. Now, recently, in the past couple of years, been joined in the number one slot by Reveal. I have to admit I have a soft spot in my heart for that record, but New Adventures In Hi-Fi is absolutely my favourite record of us. Most definitely of us as a four-piece.”
If REM had set out to make an album on the road in the mould of New Adventures in Hi-Fi ten years prior, chances are that they would have failed to execute it in a comparable manner. They had been working towards this album for 15 years before finally possessing the required tools in their arsenal to make it possible.
Rather than already being a nostalgia act clinging on to their past glories like many of their age-peers, REM were still at the peak of their powers, creating classic songs like the heartbreaking ‘E-Bow the Letter’. 30 years later, the album still holds up, as I’m sure it will do when another three decades pass by.
