At My Most Beautiful - REM - Up - 1998

Well, sorry again for a bit of a lengthy gap between entries, but I took a few couple of days off of work to make a little road trip down to DC and then I had a fair amount of catching up on both work and sleep when I returned.

So anyway, since I've sort of gotten the hang of this whole travel blog thing recently I'll probably be writing a bit about DC...but I actually have a few things to say about this song, so the DC stories can wait for the next entry.

In 1998 I was working night shifts at a hospital's computer help desk in Cincinnati. I worked completely by myself for most of the night, and unless a system was down I rarely got many calls. As such had plenty of time to work on projects, catch up on reading, listen to music, etc. And one of the things I was doing was starting an internet romance with a girl I had known for a few years. She was obsessive about REM and had seriously recommended this album to me.

Now I, like many people, had sort of assumed that Bill Berry's departure after New Adventures in Hi Fi meant the end of REM as a creative force...and by and large I was correct, however they still had one last good album in them (Unless they seriously surprise me in their middle aged incarnation). And that album was Up.

The departure of Berry left the band free to experiment a bit. Their tour with young upstarts Radiohead as openers had left them with a taste for a bit more unusual textures and much of the album shows this influence. At My Most Beautiful however is one of the few songs on the album that looks backwards...it is admittedly a band trying to sound like the Beach Boys and they do a stirling immitation. Michael Stipe has long admitted his boredom with the icons of classic rock, but in doing his band mates a "Favor" and doing this song in the Pet Sounds style actually allowed the song to open up and breathe rather than stagnating in imitation. The sleigh bells, the baritone horns, the perfect pitched harmonies all work to show the delicacy of the song in both lyrical content and structure. It's really a lovely song and makes me wish even further that they had simply hung up their hats after this album.