Newsletter 81: Appreciating Latter-Era R.E.M.

I’ve decided to start putting some of the best newsletter essays here on Medium, so more people can read them. You’re still better off just subscribing. This one’s from November 2017, when I tried to rank post-Warner Bros.-signing R.E.M. albums. We hosted a party last night where there was a lot of R.E.M. playing — as will happen when you live in Athens, Georgia, and are 43 — so I got to thinking about this ranking. I still stand behind it.

R.E.M’s “Automatic For the People” celebrated its 25th anniversary back in October, though the real celebration has been this month with the release of the new remastered version, which is great and you should immediately buy. All anniversaries hit me hard anymore — it has been 28 years, for example, since I was the age of Roy Moore interest — but something about that album turning 25 kills me. The first time I ever listened to it, I was working at the Cinema 1–2–3 in Mattoon as a projectionist and usher. My job was to splice the movies together reel-to-reel onto a massive platter and then run them through the projector to make sure they were in the right order. (I once screwed up “Cool World,” mixing reels two and three, not that anyone noticed or cared.) This process took about an hour and was very loud. I would listen to my Discman while splicing them together, and the day “Automatic For The People” came out, I was putting…