I have a job where I can sit in an adult-size beanbag for a couple of hours a day if I want. It’s right next to my desk. Nobody else seems to like to in my area, so I take it when things are slow.

I have friends here. But not super close ones. Nobody I can talk to about REM ending their three legged phase. So I’m sitting here listening to Reckoning, trying to piece together my REM memories.

They were already the biggest band in the world. The Green and Out of Time days, Stipe mostly bald already. They already had a Best of, which was a good thing to get when you ripped off the Columbia House CD club.* I didn’t know anything about the underground, they were just a pop band, perfectly acceptable for elementary school kids like me. I feel like we would have sung “Shiny Happy People” in choir. Stipe was on “Pete and Pete” and it all made sense.

My best friends parents were into them. They had a house full of books, mandolins and even a dulcimer. I didn’t understand bohemia, but it interested me.

What else. Monster was a big album guys my age. I think I traded my older brother One Hot Minute for it. I realized later that it was hated by the old school, maybe more than all the others. That just made it our REM album. The idea that a band could go back and get rawer, that they’d ditch orchestras and play loud, that’s what 12 year old boys wanna hear. Each video mattered. Cobain had ODed in Europe before he killed himself, so the Monster tour where everybody got sick scarred me. I still worry about traveling abroad.

My wife and I bonded over “Nightswimming.” It was heartbreaking and beautifully wistful, and that’s what kinda teenagers we were. I fell backwards into the back catalogue through my 20s, even if I more or less dropped off after New Adventures in Hi-Fi. It seemed to go on forever.

I saw them live in 2004 at the vote for change show at Cobo Hall. Still played like mofos. I was thrilled. Springsteen sang a weird harmony on “Bad Days” that I always sing when I hear it. 

I try to be as inspired by a band pushing on when the mystery is drained away as much as by them being brave enough to embrace it the first place.

“… And I Feel Fine.” 

*Don’t tell me we didn’t steal music before the internet.