This one is one of my all-time favorite REM songs. It’s mournful and deals with loss and distance (and I love the opening string riff- bass, I’m pretty sure?), which feels appropriate. Lead singer Michael Stipe’s voice is one of the most idiosyncratic ones I know of- definitely on the list of “what made this guy think, singing in the shower, that he could get paid for it,” but I’m glad he did. Nobody sounds like him. It manifests the word “keening.”
Just to move forward to the next artist, I’ll start with the caveat that I am an 80s/90s creation, aesthetically, and like for many folks, my generation (X) plays heavily, though certainly not exclusively, on this list. In high school, I was mad crazy into R.E.M. They didn’t sound like the rest of pop radio back then, had ties (especially in their early days) to punk and glam, and made gorgeous, impressionistic poems of songs. There are too many favorites to count, but for the end times, here are some nice ones. The obvious bedrock foundation for this is End of the World as We Know It (… and I feel fine), a cliche, but in part that’s because it’s a great song. It was the pick for so many high school yearbook quotations back then, and I love the song to this day. But I’ll put that one up next. First up is Try Not to Breathe, because of course it is. It’s off Automatic For the People, which had the band on magazine covers and playing arenas. They were huge for a hot second.
