12 Months Of Murmur: March

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. Next up: March.

“We Walk”

Here’s a memory I can’t shake: driving an ex-girlfriend’s car with her en route to Rochester’s beloved Lilac Festival, preparing myself for an afternoon of endless sneezing (I’m very allergic), and listening to “We Walk” on repeat. One full listen, then another, then another (to her slight annoyance). Michael Stipe is uncharacteristically sing-songy over a nagging arpeggio from Peter Buck—all perturbing qualities to begin with—so I see the frustration. But I love it, even after two repeats in row, and certainly after what must be total listens nearing the high double-digits now. I can’t shake the song or the memory. There’s nothing innately interesting about the memory, either, but it lingers. It probably always will. There’s a foreign feeling to it: driving a car other than mine with a person not from the city we were currently spending time in, playing Murmur on a CD-R in the year 2014, which seems both obsolete and novel, and trying to evangelize it. The purple blooms of Highland Park came later. In the moment, it was all about the music.

There’s another memory from two years before that one: drinking in my campus bar in college, laughing with friends about The Onion headline that read: “Ahmadinejad Kind Of Getting Back Into Old R.E.M. Again,” a write-up that satirically goes on to quote the “controversial world leader and Holocaust denier” explaining how the band used the slowed-down sound of pool balls clanking together as an effect at the end of “We Walk.” My friends found this funny enough, despite not being super into R.E.M., so we all chuckled standing in a circle and holding our $3 plastic cups. And that’s it. A few laughs around the general topic, but nothing more. On to the next item, which was probably our impending graduation. Not a very interesting memory here, but it, too, lingers.

The lyrics of “We Walk” read like nonsense, or more accurately like a path that leads directly into a brick wall. Here’s what Genius provides:

Up the stairs to the landing, up the stairs into the hall
Oh, oh, oh
Take oasis, Marat’s bathing
We walk through the wood, we walk

Up the stairs to the landing, up the stairs into the hall
Oh, oh, oh
Into the, oh, oh, into the, oh, oh
Up, up, up, up, up, up

I don’t typically care about lyrical content, but these are downright face-slapping, even for a band who, on the same album, sings “up to par and Katie buys / a kitchen-size, but not me in” as a pre-chorus. Maybe that’s why I hit play on the song so many times in the car. Maybe it’s why that Onion piece has stayed with me. What the fuck is this song about? Do you need to know the ins and outs of Athens, Georgia in the early 1980s to even begin to parse the meaning? (It probably couldn’t hurt.)

Now, I hear it as an evocation of two distinct memories for no discernible reason. Two memories I can’t shake. Two memories I turned over in my head more than a few times this month, only to come up empty handed. “We Walk” is all in present tense, as memories replay themselves in our minds. But our actions always become past tense as soon as we’re done doing them. Someday perhaps I won’t remember them at all and I’ll hear “We Walk” merely as Murmur’s sprightly penultimate act, with the flickers of recognition since floated up, up, up, up, up, up and away, into the — well, you get it.

Here’s the band performing it on German TV in 1985, during Stipe’s self-proclaimed Marlo Brando period, sounding almost criminally close to The Smiths and interpolating Charlie Rich. Stipe’s exaggerated faux-Briticisms make for some hilarious Morrissey-via-Georgia ribbing. Enjoy.