February 21 - Country Feedback

Today's blog is back to music again. Since Chris still appears to be doing well, I was going to look for a deep track from a band that I was lucky enough to catch as they were rising to superstardom. I had a friend in high school, Rune Sandnes, who had a very cool musical taste, and he introduced me to a couple of bands that I either hadn't really heard of or only knew one song from. The band I had heard one song from was Australian band Midnight Oil, whose song Beds Are Burning was a song I really liked, but I didn't know anything more from them. He had quite a bit of their music, and it was really, really good. The other band that I hadn't heard of (now, please bear in mind that this was probably in 1989, and they had yet to lose their religion) was a band that sonically explored a somewhat similar landscape as Midnight Oil, and they were called  R.E.M.  I remember him letting me listen to Green, and I really liked it a lot - so much that I was eagerly awaiting their next album, which happened to be Out Of Time, and all of a sudden they were a household name.

I wasn't a superfan in any way, shape, or form, but I found them very interesting and I really liked them, so when Out Of Time was released, I was liking the accoustic sound - and I was happy for them as they gained more and more popularity. However, as some of the songs got overplayed, I lost my interest a little - although I picked up all their next three albums: Automatic For The People, Monster, and New Adventures in Hi-Fi - and then Bill Berry left and I had grown somewhat disenchanted with them. However, around the time of Monster, I worked at Studentradioen in Bergen, and they received a lot of CDs for air play, and one of them was the single for Bang and Blame, and it had a live version of Country Feedback on it. I also had friends in the US who had been to see R.E.M. on their Monster tour (with Sonic Youth as support - now that would have been quite the show) who told me about the song, and so I really didn't discover it until 1996, about 5 years after it was released.

The melody is haunting - I read somewhere that the title really is more descriptive of the sound of the song than linked to the lyrics, and I can completely see that. As with so many of R.E.M's songs, the lyrics appear to be pretty stream of consciousness based with very vivid imagery throughout. The music and lyrics go incredibly well together, so well that when Michael Stipe sings "It's crazy what you could have had - I need this," I shiver and feel the goosebumps rise as his intensity increases through the song. It is hidden towards the end on Out Of Time, quite a bit after Radio Song, Losing My Religion and Shiny Happy People - but man, is this a great song...