When I was 13 years old, I heard a song on the local alternative radio station that really caught my attention. It was haunting, and the lyrics, while not really creating any linear narrative, had a kind of sadness and drama to them. The song was called “E-Bow the Letter” by R.E.M., and even though I couldn’t quite figure it out, I liked it enough to put the album on my Christmas list.
I don’t think my grandmother had any idea what she was really picking up for her grandson when she bought that album: for all she knew it was just some “hip” pop music that he had heard on the radio. I didn’t really know what I was getting either. At the time, my tastes in music were just starting to transition. I had grown up, probably like most kids, with the music my parents had liked, and in this case, I actually feel like I was pretty lucky. By the time I was a teenager, I was familiar with many of the best rock bands of the 60s and 70s; everything from The Beatles and the Rolling Stones to Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton. I was, as most teenagers do, feeling the need to branch out and explore my own musical tastes. Unfortunately, this experiment had thus far yielded poor results, due mainly to the fact that I didn’t have that many friends, and even fewer friends who weren’t goody two-shoes churchgoers like myself. This was long before music was widely available on the internet, so all I really had to explore was the radio, and for a boy in Memphis, Tennessee who was trying to get away from classic rock; who didn’t like country or R&B, the pickings were slim. Most scans of the local stations only offered up the same pop anthems. You know the type: the kind of catchy, insubstantial song that is often played 20 times a day on soft rock stations in dentists’ offices or in other places in which the management wants music but doesn’t want to offend anyone. The kind of song that is really good at sticking between your ears, but manages to do so without really saying anything. I’m not saying that pop music is inherently bad: it isn’t. The trouble was, on my newly formed and wobbly musical legs, I couldn’t really hear the difference between what was and wasn’t good music, and at the time I wanted something more. Even if I didn’t really know what that something was.
I think that’s exactly why that album had such an impact on me. New Adventures in Hi-Fi gave me the chills that first Christmas afternoon when I put it on. Sitting in my living room with my new Sony Discman, I listened to the whole album front to back. As I said before, I didn’t really know the difference between what I was hearing on the radio and what I was looking for in music, but I knew right away that this was different. My only experiences with the band R.E.M. at that point were their more poppy songs. And let’s be honest, who didn’t like “Shiny Happy People”. I also had to admit, very guiltily at the time, that I had loved the song “Losing My Religion”. But this album didn’t sound like those songs, either. It was an album that had its own flavor: and I was experiencing the flavor of an album for the first time.
For one thing, it was warmer than almost anything that I had been listening to on the radio. The emotions weren’t scripted, and the lyrics weren’t trite. In fact, I was stumped by them. They were confusing. They didn’t outright give you anything. They held no easy answers.
The music was the same way: it had depth. I’m not speaking to the technical complexity of the music or the chord structure, but to the way I felt listening to it. There were layers to the sound. There was care and passion put into its construction. Over the course of the next year, I probably listened to that album 100 times, and each time, it seemed, I caught a little bit of something I hadn’t seen before.
I think, above all, it was the questions that that album brought me to that really had the most impact on me. There were parts of that album that both glorified and stripped down for questioning who we were as a country. There were love songs put back to back with sticky songs about sex. And across the whole thing was this fierce individualism. It was shocking to me: the protagonist of this album was strong, complex, and compassionate, but believed in living with no shame or guilt, and to him, religion was a crutch. I couldn’t reconcile those things in my head. How could the person who wrote the beautiful lyrics of “Be Mine”, have written outright and unashamedly that he respected, but didn’t love Jesus at the beginning of “New Test Leper”? These were concepts that were, at the time, completely foreign to me, and right on time. They were absolutely crucial first steps on the road to self-discovery: the end of my musical innocence, so to speak, and a testament to the capacity for change that music can have on our lives. I hadn’t really understood that power until this album came along.
I was in my car this week with the ipod on random, and a song came on from New Adventures in Hi Fi and I immediately switched over to it. I once again listened to the album front to back after years of it lying forgotten. I realized all that that album did for me: how it was a pivot point in my life, and how it opened a lot of doors for me into new realms of thought. When I was 13, I didn’t have the words or the perspective to see it, but today, I have a bit more. So I thought I’d share. It just happened to be R.E.M. for me, but I know that a lot of you reading this had those pivot points or first steps in your own lives. I encourage you to go back and listen to, read, or watch them again with your new perspective. Feel free to share what those things were for you. Or go download a copy of New Adventures in Hi Fi. It probably won’t do for you what it did for me when I was 13, but it’s still a great listen.
