12 Months Of Murmur: December

R.E.M. released Murmur, their fizzy, aching full-length debut, in 1983. It became Rolling Stone’s top album of the year and helped propel the band in a steady climb to become one of the biggest in the world. Murmur has 12 songs — at least two are serious contenders for best in their catalog — and as you’ll recall, years have 12 months. This project, 12 Months of Murmur, is my attempt to match the songs on the album (via mood or sound or narrative, etc.) with how I lived the months of 2017. Each entry is posted on the last day of the given month. Last up: December.

“West of the Fields”

What does one learn after 12 months of Murmur? I learned that I ended up where I started, with “West of the Fields” as my least-known and least-loved track on the album. That, more than any other reason, is why it’s dead last here, paired up with December.

But “West of the Fields” contains riches for someone, if not me. It tells a rustic tale of “Elysian” dreams and far-spanning grange evoked via the album’s artwork. It also points toward the dark, rural, gothic record R.E.M. would make in 1985 with Fables of the Reconstruction. Plus, it’s got a killer chorus of multiple vocal parts (haunting with “long gone, long gone”), a standard band trick by now, and enough reverb on the drums and guitar to remind you that yep, it’s an ‘80s song.

And past that, my friends, I don’t have much else to say about “West of the Fields.” The garbled lyrics here don’t do much for me, and the band’s usual clever effervescence is swapped out for a folk arrangement that’s simply not as haunting as I’d like it to be. That’s also why I’ve saved it for the last entry. How do you write about a piece of music that doesn’t make you feel much?

But writing about “West of the Fields” offers a unique chance as an R.E.M. fan to examine what in fact doesn’t connect with me, and ask, why? I may actually never know, and a year from now, I might hold a neon arrow up to the song as a peak of the band’s greatness and offer a mea culpa. Right now, it’s just one that, like “I Remember California” on Green or “Low” on Out of Time, doesn’t mean much to me even on repeated listens. And that’s OK! Maybe because I haven’t spent much time with it, I haven’t allowed myself to build a natural emotional-memory connection with it. Or maybe it’s that I know my favorite R.E.M. songs — “Fall on Me” and “Welcome to the Occupation” and “These Days” and more — just hold so much promise, so I gravitate to them more.

2017 was a shit year, much like 2016 was a shit year. They’re all shit years. But they’re all chances to foster new and exciting pathways with the stuff you love. Besides, I met Michael Stipe in 2017 and sat in a large, booming theater with Mike Mills as we listened to a uniquely remastered Automatic for the People together. So it can’t all have been bad. “West of the Fields” is not bad, either. I don’t know what else to say about it right now, but I know it’s not bad.

Let’s just say, hypothetically, that I continued this series next year with the tracks from Automatic instead. They all feel simultaneously like perfect openers and perfect closers, so who knows where I’d even begin. Maybe it’s best to cherish the memory of that night inside that theater with one of the best R.E.M. albums ringing in my head. Maybe—and this is important—I need to stop spraying the music I love across the private, intimate corners of my life like messy aerosol paint so I stop getting bummed when it ends up looking less than profound. I guess what I’m saying it that maybe I shouldn’t waste another year.

But we all know I will. Long gone, long gone.

(This live version absolutely rips, by the way.)