No. 1 With an Attitude

If R.E.M. isn't a rock & roll band, what is it?

Buck muses for a moment — "We're a rock & roll band that plays sitting down, I guess."

Bill Berry puts it this way: "I'm getting a little bigger around the midsection. The energy isn't the same. I used to be able to go out and party and wake up the next day and do it all over again. My priorities have really shifted. We're in our prime as far as writing songs goes, and that's what we feel like right now — we feel like a studio band."

If Out of Time is not the best record R.E.M. has ever made, it's only because every album from Murmur onward is awfully good — even Fables of the Reconstruction, which some band members have maligned over the years but which Stipe believes is the strongest collection of songs the group has yet written. Still, Out of Time is as challenging as anything in the catalog. For every song that sounds unmistakably like R.E.M. — the plaintive "Half a World Away," for instance — there are several that don't: the bare and edgy "Low", the funky "Radio Song," which includes a guest rap by KRS-One; and the galloping, folksy duet "Me in Honey," which features B-52 Kate Pierson.

"We've learned to trust each other's instincts," Berry says. "If somebody suggests something, we'll try it. No matter how wacky it is. We couldn't figure out what to do for the middle of 'Get Up.' I had a dream that we should set twelve — not eleven, not thirteen — but twelve music boxes going at the same time. They were all like 'Well..okay.' And it worked. I mean, maybe it didn't work, but it's there forever now."

Buck agrees "None of us gets exactly what we want," he says, "and you learn to live with that It's something that I would never have believed I'd be able to do when I was twenty-four. I used to be like 'Goddamnit, this is my song I don't like that verse. Either you change it or I will' Now it's like 'Yeah. That's interesting.'" Of "Country Feedback" — a groaning, pedal-steel number that's one of the most compelling tracks on the new album — Buck explains that he and Berry wrote and recorded the music in a couple of hours. "Michael came in the next day and scatted the words," Buck says. "Usually, he has pretty concise words. We get to look them over. We'll say, 'Repeat this. Pull this out. Maybe change this line.' With 'Country Feedback,' he just had two little drawings on a piece of paper — an Indian head and an arrow, I think — and he just kind of shouted."

"I could scat my way into the next century," Stipe says the following afternoon, "although I don't know how many people would want to be in the room. Given just the audacity to stand in front of a microphone and amplify yourself to a room of people — you can do pretty much whatever you want. You can read the ingredients off a cereal box." (The "lyrics" to "Voice of Harold," which is on the B sides hoe-down Dead Letter Office, consist entirely of the liner notes to a gospel album.)

Stipe is clearly uncomfortable with the cult that has grown up around his singular, imagistic lyric writing. Of lyrics like "Swan swan hummingbird, hurrah/ We're all free now/What noisy cats are we/Girl and dog, he bore his cross," the singer says, "People need to realize that there's a potential for a great deal of nonsense involved — that's a crucial element in pop songs."

Needless to say, Stipe deflects attempts at interpretation "It's like a Bob Dylan song that you've loved for years and years," says Stipe, "and then you read an interview and he says, 'Oh, it's about this dog that was run over in the street.' You're like 'What! That song colored and altered my opinion of life for three years. What do you mean it's about a dead dog in the street!'"

It's a reasonable argument, but it's strange to hear it from a man who once ghostwrote a press release so journalists would know his song "Welcome to the Occupation" (from Document} was about U S. intervention in Central America. In any case, Stipe's writing seems to be wholly intuitive. Even in cases where his source of inspiration is known — the exquisite "Fall on Me" (from Lifes Rich Pageant) is "about" acid rain, "Sitting Still" (Murmur) is "about" Stipe's sister's working with deaf children, "Camera" (Reckoning) is "about" a close friend who was killed in a car accident — it's nearly impossible to link it with the finished song.