One of the unintended consequences of my theme weeks is that I’m quick to rule out artists I’ve already covered when pulling songs for the non-theme weeks. So a band like R.E.M., which I covered in a theme week over a year ago, hasn’t been featured on the blog since. And that just ain’t right.
So I’m going to make an effort to revisit some of my favorite bands a song at a time in the non-theme weeks from now on. I’ve now covered enough ground that repetition of artists is unavoidable. And I can think of few better bands than R.E.M. to revisit song-by-song. They have so damn many good ones.
This song is almost a parody of happy songs. And again, it’s a song that has been all but disowned by its writers. Michael Stipe reportedly hates ‘Shiny Happy People’ and kept it off the band’s greatest hits collection despite it charting relatively high.
R.E.M.’s last four albums — Up, Reveal, Around the Sun and Accelerate — have been mild disappointments. Those records followed New Adventures in Hi-Fi, the excellent and underrated follow-up to Monster, and they were all recorded without drummer Bill Berry, who quit the band to live on his farm after surviving a brain aneurysm.
R.E.M. followed Automatic for the People with the grunge and feedback overload of Monster, the most love-it-or-hate-it album in their catalog.
I’m leaping over four albums now — Life’s Rich Pageant, Document, Green and Out of Time — to reach my second-favorite R.E.M. record, Automatic for the People.
Meet Me In Montauk 