12 Months Of Murmur: January
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. First up: January.
“Catapult”
This is a challenging exercise. That it’s self-imposed doesn’t make it any less so. I mean, I love Murmur and have for years. That much is obvious. But loving an album requires very little of the listener once you decide you love it because you don’t need to love it every day, let alone think about it, let alone listen to it anymore. About a dozen times, I’ve realized I loved an album midway through, say, my 40th listen of it. And then I’ve mentally added it to a listen of favorites and haven’t pick it back up for months. I don’t have to. I’ve already decided I love it.
This is a very structured and strategic way of caring about music, and it’s also probably why certain dudes have such a hard time with the idea of marriage. They’ve become accustomed to a courtship period with records—listening on repeat until something happens, or doesn’t—and then eventually claiming it as one of their own. This is not how relationships with other humans work, but for dudes who’ve listened to way more albums than had relationships, this is a model they reflexively rely on to gauge their romantic situations, likely unbeknownst to them. You can’t own people, especially not the people you love. They can grow and change, and you have to react to that. Your favorite albums won’t change, which is why they’re so easy to love. But after a while, don’t you start wondering about how Kid A would’ve ended up if Jonny Greenwood decided to rip a buzzsaw solo on the nineteenth take of “Motion Picture Soundtrack”? It might be perfect, too, just in a different way.
Anyway, I haven’t listened to Murmur in full in months, since around the time I dreamed up this song/month idea. But I’m choosing “Catapult” here for some loose reasons instead of any one of the album’s 11 other tracks even though some of those have more obvious links to how my actual January 2017 was lived. My roommate spent a week in Paris; I could’ve easily associated “Radio Free Europe” with that (But I didn’t.) Our president banned all Muslim refugees from entering the country, creating parallels to the abstract strife sung about in “Talk About the Passion.” (But that seems forced.) In reality, I spent half my January keeping a pledge of teetotalism to myself and the other half unnecessarily drunk or hungover watching old Girls episodes on my couch. There is no R.E.M. song about that particular experience (that I’m aware of).
So I chose “Catapult” because of how it directly relates to that intoxication. I came back to my apartment late one night a few weeks ago, around 1:30 a.m. I can’t even remember from where, though I was mildly drunk and I wanted to play guitar. “Catapult,” made up of four simple guitar parts, is easy to play as long as you remember the structure of the song. That particular night, I did, and it felt good! It was a mild win after the big L of realizing I’d broken my dry January vow to myself for the second consecutive year in what I’ve now come to see was a fit of existential near-collapse. A few picked notes and some sloppy strums helped keep me grounded in that moment, and for about three minutes, I thought of nothing but the instrument in my lap and the way the song opens, with Michael Stipe cooing “Ooh, we were little boys / Ooh, we were little girls.” The blur of childhood was comforting, even if the rest of the song keeps its emotional motives close to the chest. The title object, repeated in its chorus over a jangle, seems invoked to represent the way life can launch you screaming from adolescence into adulthood.
This happens in multiple ways. You could endure a trauma at a young age that wrenches the mass of the Real World onto you unjustly and prematurely. You might spend years trying to execute a professional plan, only to realize you’ve lost all your friends in the process. One day you could wake up to find yourself like Tom Hanks in Big, nearly 30 years old with what feels like a teenager’s brain and a lot of questions. “Did we miss anything?” Stipe, then just 23, asks during the bridge, presumably after picking himself up from the catapult shot that flung him into adulthood. I’ve been wondering the same thing.
Thank you to Matthew Perpetua for the inspiration.
