So why is R.E.M.’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?
I’ve always had a restless wanderlust, a nervous energy to move and to see, and New Adventures in Hi-Fi is the album that binds tightest to my essential nature.
I have a vivid memory of sitting in my car in the parking lot of a nearly empty shopping mall on a rainy day in Binghamton, New York, in the fall of 1996.
I slipped New Adventures into the cassette player of the car I would later move to California in, and took in the brooding and evocative “How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us.”
I know exactly where and when this was because I had bought the album just after its release from my employer in that mall – a music store called Tape World. It was already an anachronistic chain that was somehow perfectly positioned in a shadowy wing shoppers rarely ventured to.
It was a strange season in my life – drifting months when I was no longer in college, wasn’t living at home, and could only daydream about the life that might be waiting for me.
I had graduated from college that spring and had planned to live with my parents on Long Island until late that year, when I was to depart to work in England through a Work in Britain program on the tail end of my college eligibility.
However, a brutal argument with my stepfather caused me to flee Long Island and take up a vagabond’s life of sorts in my college town. It turned out to be pretty great, actually – I was able to crash with good friends who were still in school, which included as much leftover pizza as I could eat thanks to having two roommates, Cobain and Stimpy, who were pizza delivery guys. My life consisted of playing rugby (I just wasn’t allowed to play in “A-side” games, which was fine by me), and making (literally) a few bucks working at Tape World.
And I had also met a girl.
All was well, in other words, but I could feel the clock ticking until my new life was to begin.
I can’t think of a better song to match that mood than “E-Bow the Letter,” one of my favorite songs of all time – one that still holds the power to make me emotional, to put me in my feels as the kids say these days (I think?).
It represents exile from one life and purgatory before the next. But that brief purgatory was actually weirdly happy, and that made it all the more striking, heightened maybe.
I don’t want to disappoint you, I’m not here to anoint you
I would lick your feet but is that the sickest move?
I wear my own crown and sadness and sorrow
And who’d have thought tomorrow could be so strange?
In truth, not very much more “happened” during this dislocated and pleasant if escapist drift-phase in my life. I ate free pizza and partied some and played rugby. The relationship with the girl was sweet but short-lived. I went off to England, adventures (and work) ensued, and eventually I moved to the West Coast. I’m still there, more than a quarter of a century later.
But when I look back, there’s Tape World, there’s me in my car listening to New Adventures, idly pondering how to pilfer cassettes out of the joint – which was only on my mind because they kept telling us to not pilfer cassettes out of the joint. Nirvana’s caustic fantastic From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah (#149 of best 1,000 albums ever) had also just been released, and that Tape World “salary” couldn’t possibly cover all of one’s needs, right?
So let’s get further into why New Adventures in Hi-Fi is #2 on this entire insane project, shall we? Well, I’m a card-carrying R.E.M. superfan for one, and then there’s the deep connection to a specific pocket in my life that I’ve described.
There are two additional reasons.
Most importantly, it includes some of my favorite R.E.M. songs. Or just plain songs, period. I’ve relayed the haunting and deeply satisfying gut punch of “E-Bow the Letter.” Then there’s the incredible propulsion and rock energy of “So Fast, So Numb.”
It’s a song that connects to the final reason that levitates New Adventures: it’s the feeling of movement and road-worn looseness from a band that had by that point spent more than 15 years accomplishing one creative feat after another.
Master craftsmen writing and recording on the road (for the Monster tour), letting their guard down, rocking out, taking chances, still compadres, and still together (including Bill Berry surviving a recent brain aneurysm) – and capturing the magic exquisitely while it was taking place.
Related: “The Wake-Up Bomb” is pure unshackled energy, the sound of a band both clearly in sync and having a super fun time creating music together.
Sidenote that the line – practice my T-Rex moves and make the scene – reminds me that my wife enjoys teasing me about having relatively short arms for my height. Her cute nickname for me? T-Rex.
Speaking of chances, “Leave” is both the longest song that R.E.M. ever produced on a studio album at over seven minutes and “the one with a siren blaring in the background the entire time.” I’m being glib, of course: it’s an astonishing achievement, moody and soothing and engaging with the perfect level of disarming and unsettling elements set into motion by an Arp Odyssey synthesizer.
“Bittersweet Me” only gets better over the years, the band at its 1990s arena-rocking peak, meaty hooks and anthemic chorus hitting with aplomb. R.E.M. even at its “most rock” is always leavened with emotion and nuance, with new wave and post-punk and country inflections.
All of these things make the band singular.
“Electrolite,” the album closer, is both a love letter to Hollywood and an ingenious rejoinder to the mood of “E-Bow the Letter” – cheerful, charming, brimming with joy and hope. But not blind joy nor blind hope; it’s the optimism that’s hard won after living real life, seeing things, losing things and still choosing to hold on.
You are the star tonight
Your sun electric, outta sight
Your light eclipsed the moon tonight
Electrolite
You’re outta sight
Listening to New Adventures in Hi-Fi from my house in Seattle, I’m brought back to the rainy afternoon at that Binghamton mall parking lot, my muddy rugby boots in the backseat. And it also gives me the same feeling that long journeys do – that strange, speeding-up sensation where life and space and time slide around us, and we do our best to take stock, capture meaning, live.
#2 of the best 1,000 albums ever.
Some stats & info about R.E.M. – New Adventures in Hi-Fi
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Rock Music, Alternative Pop, Indie Rock
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – not ranked!
- All Music’s rating – 4 out of 5 stars
- When was New Adventures in Hi-Fi released? 1996
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #2 out of 1,000
R.E.M.’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi on Spotify
A lyrical snippet from R.E.M.’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi that’s evocative of the album in some way, maybe
I don’t know what I’m hungry for – I don’t know what I want anymore.
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.