Day 22: "Out Of Time" - R.E.M. (1991)
Everyone, I suspect, has a pantheon of albums which are a cut above the others in their collection. Often, for reasons which have nothing to do with objective quality, some records just resonate with us in a way which is indefinable, but absolute.
I've bought this album five different times. It's part of a four-way tie for "Album which defined the reasons why I love music". This might be the best album of all time.
Listen to me here
The one thing I wasn't 100% sure about with this album is whether I owe the credit for it for me discovering it to D, who was the only other R.E.M. fan that I knew at the time (and certainly has his own story relating to this album I am sure, but I try not to tell other people's stories), or whether I had discovered it independent of, but in parallel to, my friend. We discussed it briefly at my birthday barbecue this year, and while I think we'd probably both heard songs from it independently (I'd seen videos for Shiny Happy People and Losing My Religion on MTV in 1990), D already had a significant R.E.M. back catalogue before this album came out, whereas this is the first album of theirs I ever owned, so I am going to give D the credit for introducing me to it.
I'm absolutely certain that the first of the five copies of this album I've owned was bought for me in the Christmas of 1991, on cassette. I would have been 15 at the time, and before I had passed my driving test and bought my first car at the age of 18, I'd already played the tape so much it had physically just worn out. There were no breaks in the cassette or mechanism; the tape had just begun to warp and lose volume from constant overplaying. Since I had a tape deck in my new car, this facilitated the purchase of copy number two to allow me to continue to listen to it as I drove around.
When my car was broken into the following year, and my tape player and plastic bag full of 'car tapes' jacked, that meant I needed to buy the album on cassette for a third, and final time. Eventually, as the years went on, I finally graduated to a car with a CD player in the mid-2000's, which meant that my In Car Entertainment options all needed an upgrade as well - enter copy number 4. That copy, because it was often loose in my car because changing CDs and putting them back in their proper cases is a fool's errand while driving, ended up being all beat to hell by the time the CDs started making their way from the car to the house for storage, and that meant I ended up buying it a fifth time; as you can see from the photo, this copy has fared no better than the others, but it's still functional at least.
Because of this, I have a hundred memories associated with this album. I listen to it, and I think about driving to work in the driving snow in my beat up Mini, and having "Country Feedback" playing as I went into a skid for 150 yards after coming off a roundabout, literally drifting sideways down the road with no control and miraculously not hitting anything or seeing any other traffic until I slid slowly to a halt. I remember listening to "Near Wild Heaven" before I left my parents house to go on my first real date with Kate, my first real girlfriend.
With so many memories (and not all of them good, I am sure I can find a venue later in this existential-crisis-in-blog-form to talk about how Losing My Religion might have recently been forever tainted for me), I can't reasonably sit here and listen to and analyse this album dispassionately. I listen to this album, and it reminds me what it is to love music.
But most of all, when I hear this album, I remember vividly one New Year's Eve. I can't say exactly when it was, but I was probably 17 or 18 at the time. I'd been at a house party, probably at our friend Danny's house, which was always the venue for our underage drinking and debauchery for some reason. I'd left, but not too late, and I was walking home on my own, which at the time was a good three mile slog up a relatively substantial hill. I had my walkman with me (as I always did), and was trudging up the grassy bank of Loundsley Green Hill in Chesterfield, cutting between the newly planted trees so I could cut back through the playing field of St Mary's School and save myself 10 minutes on the trip home.
The night was incredibly clear, and I was in that most elusive of states of inebriation; conscious, lucid, but divorced from my insecurities and concerns - just in the moment, wobbling gently but with purpose up the hill with my headphones on, Michael Stipe ringing in my ears. As I crested the hill, I stopped to take a 30 second breather, and turned to look down at the valley below me, the suburbs that I had grown up in but we had moved away from, where the friends I had just left still lived,
"Half a World Away" began to play.
That was the first time I experienced, through some universal alchemy, music and circumstance and emotional state combine to completely encapsulate the way I was feeling, looking down at the streetlights and house lights of the neighbourhood I grew up in. I stood at the top of that hill, and for 3 minutes and 28 seconds, sang along with the Michael Stipe in my ears. It must have sounded awful. And as the final notes faded away, I did something which I almost never do if I can help it. I turned the album off, not letting the cassette move on to "Texarakana". At that point, I didn't want anything else to disrupt the feeling I had just had.
In silence, I stuck my hands in my pockets, turned my back on my old neighbourhood, and walked off into the future.
