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Michael Stipe said in an interview that "Fables of the Reconstruction" was his least liked record. When they recorded it the band was exhausted from touring, th
by bpyne 11y ago
Michael Stipe said in an interview that "Fables of the Reconstruction" was his least liked record. When they recorded it the band was exhausted from touring, they were burned out and very negative. The negativity made for a dark record. He felt the negativity wasn't what they were about. That album is one of my favorites because of the darkness.
Ben addressed this divide between the artist and fan in the interview. It's so true that the context in which a song is heard becomes part of the song in a person's memory.
I'm a recently-become fan of DCfC. I can already tell that I'm going to listen to their songs many times over and think about every lyric in their albums the same way I did with REM.
- tptacek 11y agoWhich is crazy because fully half of REM's whole catalog is inessential, and Fables is if not their second best album at least their third best, and is the bridge between the Murmur sound and the musical trajectory they'd start on with Document. Also: there's a difference between "darkness" and "melancholy", and also: better "dark" than "sophomorically shrill", which is the tone they adopted on Pageant, Document, and (especially) Green. You can do better than Death Cab! I liked some of their earlier albums, but their lyrics have always been sort of weak and superficial to me (those lyrics also ruined The Postal Service for me).
- sanderjd 11y agoTo each their own – I like (a lot of) the lyrics of both Death Cab and The Postal Service because they're refreshingly simple and straightforward without being eye-rollingly cheesy. I think they pull off an "I'm just a normal person telling you about my thoughts and feelings" effect without being inane. Edit: And thanks for the interesting run-down of REM albums. I've never listened to them much, and you've given me a good sense of where to start.
- mturmon 11y agoYet, Thomas coyly omitted his actual #1 and #2 picks! The place to start with REM would be Automatic for the People, a great record by any standard; it is quite forthright, lyrically, about where it's coming from. Second would be Murmur, which is somewhat the reverse. You get the feeling, but the words are ornamentation or invitations to projection.
- tptacek 11y agoMurmur, Reckoning/Fables, Automatic, Document, Pageant, Green, Out of Time, and after that can someone just make me a mix tape with the good songs from the other 7 albums?
- bpyne 11y agoPageant was a bridge from observation of problems to the realization that average people can make a difference. I haven't taken the time to make a time line, but it probably paralleled Stipes' increased political activism. I lost track of them after Green, but I think everything up to there is pretty relevant. They're all just different recordings that follow the band's maturation as people and growth as musicians. They would have become boring quickly if everything sounded like Murmur. Which bands do you recommend for meaningful lyrics?
- tptacek 11y agoLow, Neutral Milk Hotel if you like early REM, a lot of Wilco, Midlake (a bit on the nose though), Sparklehorse, maybe the Replacements. Just not Bon Iver.
- bch 11y agoFables was also recorded in London, England[0], and iirc that wore on them. Apparently they almost split-up after that album. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fables_of_the_Reconstruction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fables_of_the_Reconstruction