The album reached #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, produced six singles, and sold more than 18 million copies. It's not a perfect album—I can do without track six, "Sweetness Follows," and I always skip track nine, "Star Me Kitten," but the other ten tracks on the album are absolute masterpieces, each and every one.
The first four tracks, "Drive," "Try Not to Breathe," "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite," and "Everybody Hurts" are R.E.M. at the pinnacle of their career. Each song blends the country-infused instruments with Michael Stipe's trademark nasal croon to brilliant effect. "Monty Got a Raw Deal" and the political primal scream of "Ignoreland" anchor the center of the CD, and then the ending...oh, the ending.
Track ten is "Man on the Moon," a tribute in part to the brilliant insanity of Andy Kaufman. What follows are simply the two best songs R.E.M. ever recorded. #11 is "Nightswimming," just a piano, a string arrangement, and Stipe's voice. #12 is my favorite song on the whole album, "Find the River," an elegiacal metaphor of the journey of life. Stipe and the band take us down a river where bergamot and vetiver, ginger, lemon, indigo mark the places on the bank, flowing eternally and inexorably to the ocean, the very image of life ending in one kind of death—the end of the river—but another kind of life, the endless ocean.
This album also means so much to me because it marks the beginning of my sobriety, now extended into its 23rd year. I heard "Drive" on the radio many times in those first tenuous days of sobriety, before I even knew what it meant or where it was going to take me. This album was my constant companion in those early days, and it's been with me ever since, and it's easy to see that it will always be at the top of this list. It's my most cherished piece of music I own.
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