The R.E.M. song that was a response to ‘Every Breath You Take’
During their start in the 1980s, R.E.M. could not have been further away from the mainstream. Outside of their unique look, having a singer who barely enunciated any of the words he was singing wasn’t bound to leave an imprint on anyone, only for Murmur to blow the lid off the entire music scene overnight. Although Michael Stipe always prided himself on playing music on his terms, he got one of his creative breakthroughs by listening to one of the biggest acts of the 1980s.
Throughout the first half of their career, R.E.M. was already making music that was pulled from rock history. Even though they were one of the most miniature commercial rock outfits out then, it’s easy to pick up on the effects that everything from punk to new wave to the British Invasion had on the group’s sound, especially in the attack of Peter Buck’s guitar.
Compared to the rest of the starlets working their magic on MTV at the time, R.E.M. had their own unique identity, making videos that hardly featured any of the band members in them and creating a career out of artistic additions to their work rather than focusing on the mystique behind every band member.
By the time the band made their way into the 1990s, they were starting to become elder statesmen of the alternative movement, with everyone from Pearl Jam to Nirvana singing their praises in interviews. Despite their newfound success, the band continued to evolve in the years since, creating one of their seminal recordings on the album Out of Time.
Although the album would be home to one of Stipe’s least-loved R.E.M. songs, ‘Shiny Happy People’, the album’s cornerstone would be the first single ‘Losing My Religion’. Dominated by Buck’s chiming mandolin, Stipe admitted to taking the concept of the song from hearing The Police sing ‘Every Breath You Take’.
When discussing the song later, Stipe loved the subtle darkness of the track, telling Song Exploder, “I remember ‘Every Breath You Take’ by The Police, and I thought that was the most beautiful, kind of creepy song. Are they a stalker? What’s the story? I wanted to do the same thing, but I flipped it and made it about the vulnerability. I created a character that’s calling out to someone, and we don’t know if that someone even knows if that person exists”.
Aside from the drastic change of style, the lyrics depict Stipe as his most emotionally frail, talking about this person who most likely doesn’t even know that he exists and trying his best to find some emotional connection with them. Without even knowing it, though, the band were on the verge of a new form of rock music coming just a few years later.
In the years following the song’s release, the birth of the adult alternative genre would take the sounds of R.E.M. and expand on them even further, with artists like Sheryl Crow and Counting Crows writing songs that were far more vulnerable than any songwriter had attempted up until that time. Rock may have been in dire need of an upgrade in the early 1990s, but in terms of cultural impact, ‘Losing My Religion’ most likely deserves a spot next to Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in terms of restructuring what rock would become.
