In the fall of 2015, my friend Tom and I were invited to be contributors to a now-defunct website. It was ostensibly a group of six to eight creative, music-loving types, who could perform deep-dives into whatever topics inspired us. In the end, none of the other contributors came through with a single post, and the site was ultimately abandoned.
My inspiration for this specific series came in the form of hearing some old R.E.M. singles on satellite radio; songs that sounded good to me in the moment, taken from albums that I have owned for decades—that nonetheless felt like they were hitting my ears for the first time. This was already a few years after R.E.M. had thrown in the towel, so I started considering their catalogue as a whole, its idiosyncratic impact on me as a music fan, and the potential for rediscovering music that I had never fully absorbed.
I have a healthy dose of skepticism for reviewers who deliver their opinions as somehow more definitive than yours. Because I'm a big believer that our opinions of art are deeply informed by our own experiences and who we are as people, I wanted to write a series of essays about R.E.M. from my point of view, about how they've loomed large in the pantheon of bands-who-make-the-kind-of-music-I-like without ever rising to become one of the bands I'd list among my favorite artists. At the same time, I wanted to listen to each album anew, to challenge my pre-existing notions of their high and low points, good and bad albums, and dig out all the gems that had gone unmined (by me) over their three decades of output.
To provide a counterpoint, I invited Tom Demi—who I knew to be a dedicated R.E.M. fan from nearly the very beginning—to take the journey with me, which he graciously agreed to do. I set the format: We'd compose a post for each of their studio albums, 15 in all. We'd take turns writing for a bit, then, at an appropriate point, turn it over to the other to continue forward. The tone was to be conversational, and neither of us would argue against the other's opinion (though we were free to disagree). Finally, for context, we would each inject a little of ourselves into each post, be it the circumstances under which we encountered the music, or just where we were at those given points in our lives. I've dubbed this format autodiscography—a casual blurring of autobiography and album review. Fortunately, Tom fully understood this approach, and between November 2015 and January of the following year we cranked out our posts, amassing well over 30,000 words on the albums of R.E.M. (each entry aiming for around 2000 words, but usually spilling over).
This new venture, Tremendous Views, may or may not have a longer shelf life than that original site, but I thought this would be a chance to rescue these essays from the trash heap of internet history, and to seed my new site with something more interesting than an "under construction" page. I hope you enjoy them.
Quick links: Murmur (Part One); Reckoning (Part 2); Fables Of The Reconstruction (Part 3); Lifes Rich Pageant (Part 4); Document (Part 5); Green (Part 6); Out Of Time (Part 7); Automatic For The People (Part 8); Monster (Part 9); New Adventures In Hi-Fi (Part 10);