Essential R.E.M.: Their 40 greatest songs, ranked

R.E.M., accompanied here by Stipe’s avowed hero Patti Smith, plays with divine fire on this superb number from the band’s 1996 album “New Adventures In Hi-Fi.” Stipe genuflects to his idol, giving her the space to steal the show at the song’s outro as she yearningly laments, “pulls us near, tastes like fear,” on a staggeringly powerful and appropriate collaboration.

“Strange Currencies” was released on R.E.M.’s ninth album, 1994’s Monster, and it found new life during the credits of the 2018 cult film Under The Silver Lake. The director purportedly chose the song because he viewed it as a “sincere love song,” which is ironic given that Michael Stipe once said he found most love songs to be “odious.” “Strange Currencies” is a woozily scarred ballad on an album full of rockers, but it’s also one of Stipe’s finest tunes, grappling with obsession, fantasy, and the fact that everybody does indeed hurt the most when they’re all alone.

Written as a tribute to Vic Chesnutt after he took his own life in 2010, “It Happened Today” is a gorgeous ode to the songwriter, who was a great friend of the band. The tune’s emotional apex is in its harmonies, as Stipe sings, “It happened today, hooray, hooray,” mantra-like, glacially building to a stunning coda, as Eddie Vedder and The Hidden Cameras’ Joel Gibb join the band in a keening wordless chorus which conveys deep regret and ache, sublimating it into a grand catharsis.

The provenance of “Perfect Circle” has long been a point of contention. Peter Buck said it was inspired by him crying while watching kids playing a game of football with Stipe. Stipe has denied that. Whatever inspired it, “Perfect Circle” is one of the prettiest moments on Murmur, with its gossamer acoustic instruments and a tastefully spare piano arrangement. The track’s primary songwriter was Bill Berry, which reminds us how egalitarian the band was when they were at their best.

The elegiac closer to Automatic For The People, one of the band’s greatest albums, “Find The River” favors equanimity and dignified resignation. The song’s harmonies are incredible, and Stipe’s lyrics are appropriately maudlin, as he urges, “Strength and courage overrides the privileged and weary eyes of river poet search naïveté,” capturing both yearning pathos and a conviction that hope is, now more than ever, essential.

Mike Mills was oft cited as as R.E.M.’s secret weapon, or more specifically, his harmonizing was. His surprise lead vocal on “Near Wild Heaven” fits into the breezy milieu on the album Out Of Time. Mills nods obviously to The Beach Boys, long a band favorite, aping tricks from “In My Room” with his vocals here. On an album which veered from strength to strength, this cut is a dark horse favorite of many R.E.M. fans, and makes us hope Mills delivers with a solo album at some point.

Few expected to hear Peter Buck shifting directions and churning out snarling power chords at a time when his arpeggiated jangle was still all the rage on the college circuit. But Buck rarely repeats himself, and he doesn’t like following rules. More shocking on “Begin the Begin,” though, is Michael Stipe enunciating lyrics that follow a seemingly linear path. It makes sense that the track, a clarion call opener to the 1986 album Life’s Rich Pageant, would remain a favorite for so many, as R.E.M. transformed into a rock band on Pageant, eschewing some of their mystery in the process. Their edict is one of evolution or death, so radical departures shouldn’t shock us, but many fans were pleasantly surprised when they heard “Begin The Begin,” one of the band’s first full-tilt rock songs.

Here, as on all of Chronic Town, the world is silvery and elusive and the need for explication is nonexistent. “Wolves, Lower” is all about intuition and instinct at every single level. The song doesn’t embrace a first thought/best thought path because thought isn’t a part of the equation. However you’d phrase it, this song’s elusive appeal is nothing like that of “Losing My Religion,” and a band who can write songs so effortlessly while putting themselves under the gun to perpetually evolve is astounding.

The public’s introduction to R.E.M., “Radio Free Europe” was the first single for the band on Hib-Tone and an epochal moment from the early ’80s. A decidedly different arrangement appeared on the version of the song that kicked off Murmur. Regardless of which version you favor, this is the song which announced R.E.M. as one of the great bands of the ’80s.

“Hey kids, rock and roll,” goes the eery, sinister line from “Drive,” presenting a darker, more introverted side of the band as the first single from the album Automatic For The People. Largely foregoing rock for weirdness and balladry, the track was a great choice for a single. It gives people an idea of what they were getting themselves into, a world utterly out of time and place which gives pause for reflection, mourning, and how to gather together and move on.

“World Leader Pretend” was the first R.E.M. song to have its lyrics printed in an album booklet, which wasn’t completely necessary, considering that they were clear in the mix, with Stipe light years removed from his days of consonant dropping mumbles. But seeing the words in print reinforced just how damn good they were, and how beholden Stipe was in this instance to Leonard Cohen. Green was released on election day in the U.S., when yet another “world leader pretend” would be voted into office. The song was a call to regather and focus on controlling what was in front of you, imparting that the war within is the one only you can win.

“What’s the Frequency Kenneth?” kicks off Monster with an ebullient bang worthy of The Rolling Stones. Wah wah washes and tremolo shimmers deliver a forceful jolt. Listening now, the song’s pop culture references are rendered more obscure, hammering home the point of the song, which is one of desperately trying to remain vital and human in a rapidly changing world when everything and everyone is destined for obsolescence. “What’s the Frequency Kenneth?” is a celebration of this inevitability, with a wryly absurdist sense of humor.

Stipe revealed during a 2008 interview that “7 Chinese Brothers” was about him breaking up a couple and proceeding to have relationships with both parties afterward, which was a bit of a shocker to anyone who’d long loved the song. Stephen Malkmus said later, “Thanks Michael Stipe for ruining that song for me.” But it puts into sharper focus some of the emotions lurking beneath the veneer—regret, loss, and sorrow, all inevitable after one overcomes the silly follies of their youth.

An archetypal R.E.M. song, the train motif of “Driver 8” perfectly captures the mood on Fables Of The Reconstruction, demonstrating how blurring and disorienting constant movement is, and the havoc it can wreak on fragile psyches. And when Stipe reckons “We can reach our destination,” it’s quickly countered with “but we’re still a ways away.” You can get there from here, but it’s not always gonna go as planned.

If any song encapsulates R.E.M.’s joyful side, this is the one. It was initially loathed by Peter Buck, who wanted the track left off their 1987 album Document. Buck was thankfully vetoed, and “End Of The World” was beloved by fans from the outset. It’s become hard to appreciate the song at times, due to extensive placements in film and its presence as a fixture of pop culture lore. But when you hear Stipe scream, “It’s time I had some time alone,” you’ll remember that this is also a deeply personal and moving song with a level of universal connectedness few bands ever come close to achieving.

“Cuyahoga” is one of R.E.M.’s finest political songs, diving headlong into the oppression of Native Americans, and the ways they’re systematically dehumanized in the name of making a quick buck and placating imperialist land grabbers. The song is at its best when it’s most direct emotionally. When Stipe laments, “We are not your allies/We cannot defend,” he’s urging us to not just listen but to also empathize. Political songs are always divisive, and there are never easy answers. The best are those which pose non-didactic questions without judgment, which Stipe does exceedingly well here.

When Murmur was released in 1983, songs written in an attempt to illuminate the plights of the disadvantaged weren’t common. The poor, the homeless, and the destitute were an afterthought to most, as Reagan’s presidency was beginning to kick in full-tilt. R.E.M. bucked this trend on “Talk About The Passion,” later described by Peter Buck as “a hunger song.” The accompanying video included a Jem Cohen clip with stark imagery of the homeless of New York City. One of R.E.M.’s first direct forays into politics, it remains one of their finest.

“At My Most Beautiful” is R.E.M.’s most direct homage to an influence which was apparent frequently throughout their later years, that of Smile-era Beach Boys. It’s easily the most emotionally direct song on Up, with Stipe’s wide-eyed declaration that, “I’ve found a way to make you smile,” realizing the romantic optimism he was previously loath to acknowledge.

“Life And How To Live It” hints at the more arena-ready bombastic direction the band would soon explore, and is an outlier on Fables Of The Reconstruction in its ebullience of mood. Peter Buck’s opening guitar motif is like a lit fuse, slowly building until detonating into a reckless hurtle of joy and catharsis.

Despite becoming a fixture on the pop culture landscape and often derided as too maudlin, “Everybody Hurts” is still one of R.E.M.’s best songs. It’s disarming in its emotional directness as a plea to not commit suicide. When it was played nightly during the encore on the Monster tour, it came immediately after “Let Me In,” Stipe’s requiem for Kurt Cobain. While it served as a reminder that not everyone can be saved and that some don’t want to be, it also reinforces that life is for the living, an uplifting theme that’s pervasive in the spirit of R.E.M.

“Orange Crush” out-anthems “The One I Love” with its propulsive, machine gun groove and signature jangle piercing like a lightning strike. It’s not as didactic or strident as a U2 or Clash song, but it’s direct and personal for Michael Stipe, which is what makes it such a compelling listen. In the track Stipe alludes to his father serving in the war as a helicopter pilot. It was unusual for him to touch on something that overtly personal at this point of his career. An interesting aside, but it’s the sheer sonic power of the song which makes it one of the band’s best.

Initially “Electrolite” wasn’t a favorite of Michael Stipe’s, who had to be convinced by the rest of the band that it should make the cut on New Adventures In Hi-Fi. While never really a hit, “Electrolite” has over time proven to be one of the band’s most beloved songs. Like “Nightswimming,” it shimmers gorgeously courtesy of a circular piano motif. Stipe raises the stakes lyrically, name checking James Dean, Steve McQueen, and Martin Sheen because, as he once explained in an interview, they are “All iconic, all representing different aspects of masculinity”—an appropriate analysis from a singer who subverted traditional masculine tropes in favor of ambiguity.

Murmur found R.E.M. enmeshed in mythology as enigmatic as the kudzu that adorns the record’s cover, with an idiosyncratic dialect that helped define a sonic template for both themselves and much of alternative rock in the ’80s. “Shaking Through” is one of the album’s more conventional numbers, with Peter Buck’s chiming guitar lead recalling The Byrds, alongside a lilting piano melody reminiscent of Simon & Garfunkel, courtesy of Mike Mills. Michael Stipe’s lyrics aren’t his most evocative, parsing the obstacles to communicating one’s emotional truth, but he’s proving to us that inscrutable phrases can still resonate. It’s the context that counts.

Early live versions of “The One I Love” revealed a song that, while obviously great, was too loud and too abrasive to be considered for radio. Scott Litt helmed the board while producing Document, smoothing things out and enabling it to become one of the most powerful rock songs in the band’s catalog. It was a pivotal moment for R.E.M., a resounding creative and commercial triumph that blasted open the doors to greater success. It’s a feat the band would repeat many times in the next few years, but “The One I Love” first proved they were capable of writing great, uncompromising songs which appealed to the masses.

So beloved by the band that they chose it as one of the three songs they’d perform when inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, “Gardening At Night” is emblematic of the greatness of their early material. It’s maddeningly impenetrable, with stray phrases assuming grand importance to the listener, depending upon what they projected onto it. R.E.M.’s lyrics were a virtual Rorschach blotter at this early stage of their career, destined to burst and bloom into myriad shapes and sounds and be thrust to the fore of the public’s consciousness.

Perhaps the most gorgeous song R.E.M. ever released, “Nightswimming” is also fraught with ambivalence and grapples with attachment and letting go. “You I thought I knew you/You I cannot judge/You I thought you knew me/This one laughing quietly underneath my breath,” is one of the most emotionally brazen lyrics Stipe ever offered us, capturing the wickedness of perfidy, and the pitfalls of trust. But he does so honestly and with such vulnerability, which explains the enduring appeal of this song.

If “Losing My Religion” was Out Of Time’s backbone, catapulting the band to multi-plantinum worldwide sales and making them worldwide household names, “Country Feedback” was the album’s steady metronomic heartbeat. The song offered a deluge of grief in Stipe’s free associative intonation, ”A paper weight, a junk garage, winter rain, a honey pot … crazy, all the lovers have been tagged. Hotline, a wanted ad, it’s crazy what you could’ve had.” The song culminates with Stipe, hobbled with regret, pleading, “It’s crazy what you could’ve had,” announcing he’d found the acceptance stage of this cycle, but it still hurt nonetheless.

There’s a sign visible in the bar in the “Man On The Moon” video which reads “Nothing in here is worth your life.” That sign reveals a hard truth that some make foolish barters which can result in tragic consequences. R.E.M. never ventured that far, pulling back before approaching the abyss. In the magical world conjured on “Man On The Moon” the band lassos cosmic alchemy as they tenderly recall Andy Kaufman as he’s posthumously redeemed at a “truck stop instead of St. Peters,” providing a happy ending to a story that’s incredibly sad, given Kaufman’s short life. R.E.M. manifested a glorious place of their own in their songs, and it’s conjured up beautifully on this one, which easily ranks easily as not just one of their oddest, but also one of their best. Listen anytime to be transported.

“Fall On Me” was cited by Michael Stipe on the band’s MTV Unplugged performance in 1991 as “my favorite song in the R.E.M. catalog.” Stipe isn’t alone there, as it’s long been a fan favorite. Frequently covered by other artists, this was the one song The Go-Betweens said they never missed when they supported the band in 1989 because they “needed to hear the incredible three-part harmonies.” Damn high praise, indeed. “Fall on Me” is ultimately an exhibition of the alchemical songwriting prowess R.E.M. possessed then, at the peak of their powers, a place they’d inhabit for another decade.

“Losing My Religion” marked the time when R.E.M. went from a really big rock band to household names. Of course, it helped that MTV went all in early on the song and the video’s art house intellectualism. “LMR” endeared the band to a mass global audience for the first time. It was an unlikely candidate for a massive hit. Driven by a mandolin, with no discernible chorus, and clocking in at around five minutes, we haven’t seen anything like it before or since. And we likely never will again. The R.E.M. model isn’t an easy one to emulate in 2023.

R.E.M introduced “So. Central Rain” on Late Night With David Letterman in 1983. The song, which the band said was “too new for a title” at the time, blew away viewers. The studio version, released months later, is the pinnacle of their early years. While the band shines, it’s Michael Stipe who steals the show, delivering a stunning vocal performance. Mumbled and non-sequitur, his words in the verse give way to a sublime chorus as he plaintively belts in a yearning falsetto, “I’m sorry.” Stipe was a crooner, and R.E.M. were one of America’s best bands, something they proved here in a song which endures in the pantheon of their finest moments.