R.E.M.’s last album as a quartet — and therefore the last “true” R.E.M. album — was 1996’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi.

It would be easy to dismiss the band’s subsequent output as a pale reflection on its first ten albums, but that’s a bit too easy. The five albums R.E.M. recorded after Bill Berry’s departure include some memorable work. Most notably, 1998’s Up, the band’s first record as a trio, is a rich and resonant album.

At the time of Up‘s release, Berry made the very gracious statement that he left the band only to see them record their best album yet. An exaggeration, perhaps, but certainly a sign that his was an amicable departure.

But even considering Up, New Adventures in Hi-Fi is the last album I’d number among the band’s best — their true swan song, 15 years before the end.

While Automatic For the People marked the months just after I met my future wife, New Adventures in Hi-Fi puts me back in the months just before we were married. I was working at a travel trade magazine in Miami, a position that was a strange blend of dream job and Office Space.

On the one hand, my beat of the Caribbean and Florida’s West Cost allowed me to take all-expenses-paid trips to some beautiful resorts, where I was treated like royalty in exchange for writing 1,000 words about the experience.

But when I wasn’t traveling, the work environment back home was a bureaucratic headache. We were required to sign in every time we came and went, our every move was monitored by a God-like office manager.

In the weeks leading up to the release of New Adventures in Hi-Fi, I would escape the office to my car on (rigidly timed) lunch breaks and hope to hear the first single, ‘E-Bow the Letter’ on the radio. I heard it once, I think, after hours of trying.

I was in the Dominican Republic when the album was released (and, music geek and R.E.M. fan that I am, bummed about that fact) but my fiancé surprised me with the CD when she picked me up at the airport. If I didn’t know already that I’d found “the one,” I certainly knew it at that moment.

‘Electrolite’ is the final song on the final album by R.E.M.’s original lineup, and it feels like an appropriate track to hold that title. “I’m not scared, I’m outta here,” Michael Stipe sings as the song ends.

I’d say they’ll be missed, but that’s not quite right. They haven’t gone anywhere — not really. R.E.M.’s music is as accessible and indelible as the memories it stirs in me… it is weaved into the fabric of my adolescence and young adulthood. I’ve had friends come and go over that period, but Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe have been constant companions.

Thanks, guys.