Listen: R.E.M.'s New Song 'Mine Smell Like Honey'

Anton Corbijn

"Mine Smell Like Honey," the first official single from R.E.M.'s forthcoming album Collapse Into Now, finds each member of the trio playing to long-established strengths. Peter Buck's guitar parts alternate between the jangle of 1984's Reckoning and the crunch of 1996's New Adventures in Hi-Fi, while Michael Stipe sings some seriously inscrutable lyrics in a low, weathered grumble before launching into a sweeping chorus. As ever, the band's secret weapon is Mike Mills, who provides the tune's best hook with his call-and-response backing vocals on the lead-up to the chorus.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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