R.E.M. – Shaking Through

You knew it was coming.

The way I remember it, my brother loaned me his cassette of Murmur over Christmas break my freshman year of college saying, “here, I think you’d really like this.”

So while you could say that this was another case of me just absorbing what my older siblings were listening to, it’s not the same. For one thing, my brother let me take it away to college, so clearly he wasn’t listening to it that much. Plus it was a cassette so when I was listening to it, it was on my Walkman with the headphones on and not a case of just being in the room while it was playing. It was my choice.

To say I listened to it a lot is an understatement. I particularly remember playing it while I was walking from my dorm on campus over to the women’s college a mile away, where I had a job in the dining hall. There’s something about having the music go straight into your ears that feels more intimate, more private. It can only have been a couple of weeks before I decided I needed to have my own copy. Off to Plastic Fantastic, where I then discovered there were more records by R.E.M. At that point there was Chronic Town, Murmur, Reckoning, and Fables. I can’t remember if I left the store that day with both Murmur and Reckoning or if I went back for Reckoning a different day. I just know that by the time spring break rolled around the first week of March, I insisted on taking both of them with me to my best friend’s house where I was going to spend the week. I couldn’t live without them for even a week. In short order I went back to the record store and completed my collection. I was also buying any zine I could find that had any article about R.E.M. Word was a new album would be coming out in the summer and I needed to know everything.

Sometimes I wonder, if we had never moved up to Maine halfway through my high school years, surely I would have heard R.E.M. before I got to college. I probably could even have gone to see them in concert. But we did move up to small town Maine in 1983, just when Murmur came out, and as we were so far removed from everything, it took two years before I knew anything about it. At the same time, having them to myself, in my Walkman, in my dorm room, meant I was free to binge listen as much as I wanted. I spent hours looking at the cover and the inner sleeve, hunting for clues. Could I have done that with my siblings around? The answer is no.

Everything in my life changed once I had this album. It’s like the part of my brain that feels music had a combination lock on it, and all the music I heard before Murmur was the numbers you spin clockwise and counter clockwise, before you finally get to the right number and click! The lock opens.