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The Best 25 R.E.M. Songs

Courtesy Of Flagpole Magazine

The 25 Best Ever R.E.M. Songs

R.E.M. has never been a band to hide its best songs as import-only b-sides or obscure soundtrack filler; they're right there on the albums, and are more often than not the singles. So if this list of the 25 best (and on another day it could easily be much different, as all but the top five or so changed at least once during the writing) songs of the band's career seems more like a reunion of old friends than a crate-digging, tape-trading archaeological excavation of the last quarter century, just thank Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe for letting everybody know when they've made something worth hearing.

25. "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" Document

You didn't think we were going to get out of here without hearing this one more time, did you?

24. "I've Been High" Reveal

The pinnacle of the band's burbling-electronics phase, an elegy, a statement of purpose: "Make my make-believe believe in me."

23. "Low" Out of Time

What earns this relatively unassuming song a spot on the list are the opposing effects of the dive-bombing cello in the chorus and Stipe's impassioned performance in the third verse, as the violin behind him strains to reach a little higher, just for a moment.

22. "Where's Captain Kirk?" Fan club single

A completely batty cover of obscure British punk band Spizzenergi's biggest hit, this barely sounds like good ol' familiar R.E.M., and is one of the best examples of the sense of humor that mostly stays hidden on the proper albums.

21. "Finest Worksong" Document

Along with its fraternal twin "Turn You Inside Out," this is the biggest, stompingest arena-rock anthem R.E.M. ever recorded, the reason they had to start playing places like the Omni.

20. "First We Take Manhattan" I'm Your Fan

A 1991 Leonard Cohen cover that improves on the original mainly by not sounding like Wang Chung's To Live and Die in LA soundtrack, this is notable especially for the way it prefigures the swagger that Stipe and Buck, in particular, would display three years later on Monster - they sound ready to tear the whole city down.

19. "Gardening at Night" Chronic Town

Proof that everything was in place right from the beginning.

18. "Perfect Circle" Murmur

Every sound here is focused on encapsulating the specific moment when a night ends too early: Bill Berry's understated, echoing snare, the music-box piano, the resigned bassline and the perfect couplet "Standing too soon / Shoulders high in the room."

17. "Feeling Gravity's Pull" Fables of the Reconstruction

Kicking off their third album, this song announced a new landscape where the ground shifted uneasily underneath, hooks clawed their way out of stuttery guitar noises, and melodies dissolved into string-section showdowns.

16. "You Are the Everything" Green

This sounds like a nearly-as-great warm-up for both "Losing My Religion" and "Nightswimming," with the mandolin and the breathless late-night shenanigans in cars out in the country and the low-end organ underscoring the last verse and the secret weapon of cricket noises. Plus, does the addressee wear dentures? Is that what he said?

15. "(Don't Go Back to) Rockville" Reckoning

A good reason to do a little research on your favorite R.E.M. songs: finding out that Mills, not Stipe, wrote most of the lyrics to "Rockville." A good reason not to do too much research: finding out that, instead of this being the brutal examination of dead-end small-town life you had always heard, it's a more-or-less tongue-in-cheek plea for some UGA student Mills had a crush on not to go back to Maryland over summer break. And there are no factories in Rockville. And she was only gone for six weeks anyway.

14. "Begin the Begin" Life's Rich Pageant

Arguably the rockin'-est song in the catalog, as well as a goldmine for the trivia-obsessed: rife with shoutouts to everything from Cole Porter to "Little Black Sambo," the effect is a tangle of interconnected allusion as dense as the snarling riff that kicks it off.

13. "World Leader Pretend" Green

When I was 12, I went to a gifted-students summer camp, where my roommate was an aspiring comedy writer who gave a dramatic reading of the lyrics to "World Leader Pretend," and I thought he was the smartest person I had ever met. The "raze/ raise" pun? Unalloyed genius.

12. "Crush with Eyeliner" Monster

Over Buck's overcranked perpetual-metal-machine guitar, Stipe sings a sneering ode to a sad tomato who may or may not be Courtney Love. Bonus points for Spike Jonze's karaoke-bar video.

11. "At My Most Beautiful" Up

Wherein Buck indulges his inner Brian Wilson on a sleighbell symphony that's nearly a rewrite of "God Only Knows." What raises this from pastiche to sublime is Stipe's voice, which can't hit those crystalline Carl Wilson highs, and as a result keeps it focused on more earthly delights.

10. "Losing My Religion" Out of Time

This is one of those songs that's so ubiquitous you forget how good it is until it sneaks up on you at some odd moment and smacks you in the head with how perfectly realized it is. Like the rest of R.E.M.'s best work, it's about a specific thing - obsessive, unrequited love - but, thanks to certain lyrical withholdings and eccentricities, allows its listeners to inhabit it in any way they please.

9. "We Walk" Murmur

Blame the world's most insidiously catchy nursery-rhyme melody for making sure a seemingly random reference to a David painting and the nearly nonsensical chorus "Take oasis" are lodged permanently in your brain.

8. "Driver 8" Fables of the Reconstruction

The band's entry in the "Great Songs about Trains" category, "Driver 8" displays a notable component of early R.E.M., the ability to create a fully-realized world from minimal, specific details: the "go tell crusade," the floaters on the power lines, the Southern Crescent. What could have been a simple tale of riding the rails becomes instead a mystery, a glimpse of something larger than itself.

7. "Electrolite" New Adventures in Hi-Fi

In his liner notes to the best-of compilation In Time, Buck calls this "the least melodramatic pre-millennial folk-blues end of the century good-bye song ever written," and that's about the best way to put it; it bounces along so amiably on this instantly familiar piano-banjo melody that you think everything's fine, until there's nothing there at all.

6. "Fall on Me" Life's Rich Pageant

R.E.M.'s secret weapon has always been Mike Mills' backing vocals - more "pop" than Stipe's husky mumble, grounding even his most out-there flights of lyrical fancy in radio-ready familiarity - and this is his greatest showcase, almost a Socratic dialogue between the two singers, Stipe warning the sky not to fall on him while Mills wonders what it's up there for in the first place.

5. "Sweetness Follows" Automatic for the People

An exploration of feedback as a conduit for grief, forerunning our No. 1 song below. Here Peter Buck's controlled squalls merge with cello and organ to form something fuller and deeper, yet more hopeful, than the feedback/ organ/ pedal steel interplay on the top song - the shared grief of a family rather than the solitary pain of an ended relationship.

4. "So. Central Rain" Reckoning

When people talk about an "R.E.M. sound," this is what they're talking about. A jangly guitar figure perched at the intersection of country, folk and punk; muted, mumbled verses leading to the bell-clear hook of "I'm sorry" in the chorus; the wailing, echoing attack-piano coda that leads it out of the familiar and into the realm of the epic.

3. "Swan Swan H" Life's Rich Pageant

One of the more overtly "folk" songs in the R.E.M. catalog, this might pass for an actual Civil War relic were it not for the intricate, free-associative lyrics. Is it about the Confederacy? Pirates? Cats? Fame? What? It's perfectly simple and completely mesmerizing, the band's deepest and most absurd exploration into the Faulknerian mysteries of the South.

2. "Nightswimming" Automatic for the People

It's not unwise to feel concern when a rock band breaks out the French horn, but John Paul Jones' orchestration renders all fears moot by letting the simple piano melody carry the song and providing counterpoint that grows richer and more complex as Stipe's lyrics, some of his finest, grow from plainspoken storytelling to a requiem for things lost in time.

1. "Country Feedback" Out of Time

The perfect R.E.M. song - a summation of everything that came before, and a look ahead at what would come next. The blandly descriptive title only reveals the outline of the sound and invites speculation as to alternate meanings, and Michael Stipe's lyrics meld the imagist techniques of earlier R.E.M. ("Paperweight / junk garage / winter rain / a honey pot") to the clear-eyed confessionalizing that emerged on later albums ("I was central / I had control / I lost my head / I need this"). "Country Feedback" was the highlight of the one R.E.M. show I've seen, at the Omni 10 years ago: Stipe sang most of the song on his knees, his back to the audience, as if unable to look us in the eyes, while great rippling curtains of feedback encircled everyone, even up in row RR, drawing us all together in someone else's grief.

Gardner Linn