The link below was stolen from Austin Kleon’s Friday newsletter (if you are in any way a creative type or just a voracious reader or lover of art, I highly recommend subscribing):
R.E.M. reflects on ‘Murmur’ on its 40th Anniversary
Guitarist Peter Buck nails the time span: “If, on the way to the first day of recording Murmur, we had chanced upon a radio rebroadcast from exactly forty years previous, we would have heard speeches from Franklin Roosevelt, news about World War II, and the swinging sounds of Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller. Forty years is a looong time.”
Murmur is a rare(ish) example of a great debut album1On reflection, I realize a number of bands have great debut albums, then spend the rest of their career trying to live up to them, usually with mixed success, something that was not the case with R.E.M. . These guys were in their early 20s and delivered a terrific mix of songs on their first try, making Murmur a genuine classic (I still rank it as #3 on my list of R.E.M. albums). I came to R.E.M. late, with their fifth album, Document, after hearing “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)”–a song I later came to realize wasn’t really typical of them. Like any good-but-late fan, I went back and got their previous (four) albums, in chronological order because I’m a purist or something, so Murmur was the second R.E.M. album I dove into, and I liked it even more than Document. I was hooked!
And yes, I will be listening to Murmur today. It’ll make me feel old, sure, but more than that, it will make me feel good.
UPDATE: I listened to Murmur on my 5K run. The run ended partway through “Sitting Still” so I listened to the rest on the walk home. The album is so clean and uncluttered, shifting from ballad to bouncy and back without missing a beat (say that three times fast).
I was 18 when this album came out (and did not know R.E.M. even existed at the time). Obligatory list of things I could and could not do when Murmur debuted in 1983:
I could:
- Legally drive
- Vote in federal elections
- Fight in wars and stuff
- Tell people I was an adult
I could not:
- Vote in provincial elections (you need to be 19)
- Legally gamble (21)
- Act like an adult. Come on, I was 18! I was a theatre student, on top of that.
