Mystery, meaning collide in world of R.E.M.

I came of age in the age of grunge, and while the dark disillusionment of Pearl Jam and Nirvana fit many a gray day on Washington’s gray West Side, most days felt more complicated. Most days seemed to call for a broader range of emotion than the misanthropic angst of a growling guitar.

I first heard R.E.M. when “Out of Time” exploded  in 1991 and, with it, “Losing My Religion.” I was 14, and I am telling you, life was “bigger / bigger than you / and you are not me.” I had found my auditory soul mate, the musical doppelganger to my particular brand of “different.” And yet, I felt cheated. “Out of Time” was R.E.M.’s seventh album. Why had I never heard them before? I blamed a small town with fuzzy radio reception. I blamed being born 10 years too late, far from the college-radio subculture of Athens, Georgia.

I wanted to steep myself in this music that spoke so directly to my slightly disenfranchised but raised-on-folk, mandolin-loving teen spirit. I had lost time to make up for.

Maybe it was the ink-drawn look of the blue geometric shape on the album’s gold cover. Maybe I liked the idea of a compilation, an R.E.M. crash course that, in true alternative style, was not so much a “greatest hits” as a mix tape of B-sides and alternate takes. Maybe it was the album’s title – this word I didn’t know and had to look up in the dictionary. Whatever the reason, I decided to begin my R.E.M. education with 1988’s “Eponymous,” and my life changed forever.

Yes, it was that dramatic (like I said, I was 14). Oh, the prophetic mumbling of “Gardening at Night.” Oh, “Talk About the Passion’s” poignant insistence that “not everyone can carry the weight of the world.” Oh, the mournful pleading of “Fall on Me.” And of course, that indescribable, infectious anthem of everything,  “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine),” a song I spent hours straining to discern, the cassette tape stretched thin with play-pause-rewind, play-pause-rewind as I deciphered Michael Stipe’s quick, half-spoken lyrics and wrote them out on lined notebook paper.

Over the next few years, I’d collect most of R.E.M.’s albums, old and new, first on cassette, then on CD (vinyl was both no longer and not yet in vogue). I didn’t understand a lot of the songs, even when I could make out the lyrics. But that mystery was part of the draw. Something bigger was happening inside those songs. Birds and snakes, an aeroplane. Listening to R.E.M., I could close my eyes and envision myself as someone else, walking near a bridge in the rain somewhere, still cynical and disenfranchised ( World serves its own needs / Listen to your heartbeat), but confidently so, someone as cool and misunderstood as a line from “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” And I’d feel fine.