An Appreciation of REM's Murmur at 40

On this week, 40 years ago, REM gave the world one of the truly great debut albums, a mysterious and endlessly rewarding slice of Southern weirdness, jangly guitars, and opaque yet poetic lyrics. It’s one I go back to time and time again, and yet it never fails to surprise me.

In times like this, to quote Alex Chilton and Big Star, it's hard to hold on, but the guns wait to be stuck by. When the going gets tough we all need a small thing in our lives to keep us grounded. My favorite has always been music, and there is a small number of albums that sooth my soul like few else. Murmur does that for me.

I first bought on cassette in August of 1991, since at that time back catalog albums were especially cheap in that format and cars still only had tape decks in them. (I also didn’t have the dough for a CD Walkman.) That summer I had become an REM superfan after buying Out of Time with some lawnmowing money in the spring. By winter, I owned the band's entire back catalog (except Dead Letter Office) and played it incessantly. 

Murmur was special to me because it sounded, and still sounds, like nothing else ever made. I usually listened to it late at night in the dark on my Walkman, lying on my bed and giving it my full attention. With my other senses dimmed, I felt transported into a kind of dream world, one that was as mysterious as it was comforting. Michael Stipe's infamously mumbled lyrics (which are not as illegible as sometimes claimed) allowed me to derive the meaning of the songs by intuition, much like looking at an abstract painting. In those moments listening in the dark I felt calmer and more at ease than my volatile teenage emotions ever let me feel in the agitating light of day.

Products of Athens, Georgia, REM articulated the mystical strangeness of rural small-time life like few others. It felt affirming to know there were other small-town weirdos out there on my wavelength. A friend had an REM t-shirt with an image of an old Athens warehouse on the front, and it looked like a scene straight out of my railroad town hometown. To me, this seemingly innocuous image was a signifier of identity.

Living in a small town means a lot of time for dreaming and contemplation, especially if you're a person who doesn't fit into the rigid social conventions of small-town life. If there's one thing I miss about living in small towns it's that time slows down enough there for my mind to wander to distant fields it never seems to visit nowadays. REM's early music grabbed me because it sounded like the inside of my mind on a darker than dark rural night while I lay in bed hearing the sad whine of passing trains, signals of another world beyond the one I was in.

After spending the summer of 1991 listening to Murmur and escaping to the dreamworld it built in my mind, I went back to high school more in touch with my own soul. I started to regain the confidence that was beaten out of me in junior high. (A tale as old as time) I embraced competitive debate and started winning. I have a very clear memory of riding a school bus back from a tournament in Omaha to my hometown. I had managed to get all the way to the semifinals, and I listened to Murmur in the antediluvian December darkness of a rural Nebraska night the whole way home. It was the best way to savor my first feeling of accomplishment in years. In my nights of adolescent Gethsemane, Murmur had been there for me.

And so I listen to it again, over 30 years later and feel that same spiritual uplift. Just as it gave me comfort in the worst slough of my teenage emotions, it is giving me solace in the midst of middle-aged angst and a reactionary onslaught. We need to fight, but we need to draw strength and protection, too. I hope you find it where you can, because we are all going to need it. I get it from Murmur.

(Note: this is adapted and expanded from an older post on my personal blog.)