Songs Lyrics and YT- Youtube Music Videos: Automatic For The People

R.E.M. Songs - Nightswimming Lyrics

R.E.M. - Nightswimming

R.E.M. - Nightswimming Youtube Music Videos and Lyrics

Album: Automatic For the People
Released: 1992

Nightswimming Lyrics

Nightswimming Song Chart

This nostalgic song revisits an idyllic childhood memory of the band when they would go skinny dipping in Athens, Georgia. R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck explained: "We used to sneak on this guy's property in Athens and go swimming in this water hole. It'd be great: 30 of us all running around naked. It was before AIDS, and whatever happened happened."

R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills wrote this song and played piano on the track. They recorded the song at Criteria Studios in Miami, which is where Derek And The Dominos recorded. The piano Mills played was the same one Bobby Whitlock and Jim Gordon used to play the famous ending on "Layla."

The lyrics were written before R.E.M. recorded their 1991 album, Out of Time. They couldn't find any good music for it until after the album was released.

In the video, directed by Jem A. Cohen, the song fades out for about a minute-and-a-half. All that can be heard are grasshoppers and other night noises. Then the music resumes.

The album title comes from a soul food diner in Athens, Georgia, where the waiters answer "automatic" after you order. Michael Stipe loves diners and once opened a vegetarian diner of his own.

This was the only R.E.M. song where the lyrics were written before the music, inspiring some healthy competition between Mike Mills and Peter Buck. Buck recalls in the liner notes for In Time: "Being competitive bastards that we are, Mike and I started auditioning chord changes and tunes for Michael. The two tunes of mine that Michael rejected eventually became 'Drive' and 'Try Not To Breathe.' Mike had a piano instrumental that he played to Michael. He listened once, nodded his head to hear it again, and on the second pass he sang the lyrics. It was 'Nightswimming,' exactly like the record we would record a year later. I was standing in the corner dumbfounded."

"There's a fairly autobiographical narrative to this one, and the part about the windshield really happened," Michael Stipe wrote in the liner notes for Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage, referring to the lyrics "The photograph on the dashboard taken years ago, turned around backwards so the windshield shows." He said: "That's exactly how I saw it, I'm pretty sure it was a pickup truck. I know Jem Cohen loves that line, and he made the most incredible film as a video for this song."

Mike Mills played this in concert with Robert McDuffle and the students at Mercer University's McDuffle Center for Strings. "I think one of my favorite parts is the orchestra tuning up in the beginning," he noted in Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage, 1982-2011.

R.E.M. Songs - Drive Lyrics

R.E.M. - Drive

R.E.M. - Drive Youtube Music Videos and Lyrics

Album: Automatic For the People
Released: 1992

Drive Lyrics

Drive Song Chart

The central lyric, "Hey kids, rock n' roll," was borrowed from "Rock On" by David Essex. The words may be the same, but the mood is completely different. This is a much more somber song.
Lead singer Michael Stipe explained in the November 12, 2009 issue of Rolling Stone: "There were, before Punk, a few songs that resonated with me. One was David Essex's "Rock On." "Drive" is a homage to that. It was the first song I wrote on computer. Before, I had a typewriter. The reason is my handwriting changes dramatically day to day. I don't trust it. I will write one of the best lyrics ever and discard it because the handwriting looks like s--t. Or the handwriting looks good but it's a crap lyric, lo and behold, it's in the song. Too late."

Guitarist Peter Buck used a nickel as a guitar pick for the mid-song guitar solo to get a sharper sound. He overdubbed the track six times.

There is a line in the song that goes, "Smack, crack, bushwhacked." This can be seen as an indictment of then-U.S. President George Bush (the first one). Lead singer Michael Stipe had taken out ads in college newspapers in 1988 saying, "Don't Get Bushwhacked. Get out and vote. Vote Dukakis." They weren't very effective.

This was released two months before the national election between Bush and Bill Clinton. Clinton won that one, but eight years later Bush's son became president. When the younger Bush ran for re-election in 2004, R.E.M. performed concerts to benefit his opponent, John Kerry.

This song has no chorus. That doesn't happen very often in hit songs.

This was the first single released off the album. It was issued a few days before the album came out.

At live shows, R.E.M. played a funk-rock version of this song because its ambient atmosphere was difficult to duplicate. This version appears on a 1993 benefit album for Greenpeace called Alternative NRG.

The album title comes from a sign at a diner in Athens, Georgia, where the band formed. It read, "Delicious Fine Foods - Automatic For The People."

Director Peter Care shot the black-and-white music video at Sepulveda Dam in the Sherman Oaks area of Los Angeles. The clip mostly has Stipe crowdsurfing as he performs the song.

R.E.M. Songs - Man On the Moon Lyrics

R.E.M. - Man On the Moon

R.E.M. - Man On the Moon Youtube Music Videos and Lyrics

Album: Automatic For the People
Released: 1992

Man On the Moon Lyrics

Man On the Moon Song Chart

This was inspired by the late comedian Andy Kaufman. When he was a teenager, R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe saw Kaufman on Saturday Night Live, and has cited him as a huge influence ever since. See a photo and learn more about Andy Kaufman in Song Images .

Things mentioned in this song: Mott the Hoople, Life, Monopoly, Twister, Risk, checkers, chess, twenty-one, wrestler Fred Blassie, Elvis Presley, Moses, Sir Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin.

Kaufman was known for his Elvis-impersonations, which he once performed on Saturday Night Live. Stipe tries one of his own on the line, "Hey, baby are we losing touch?"

This was used as the title for a 1999 movie about Andy Kaufman, starring Jim Carrey. R.E.M. did the soundtrack, which included this.

Andy Kaufman was never married. He met his long time girlfriend Lynn at a restaurant while shooting a short independent film. The movie told a different story of how they met. (thanks, Jessy - Pittsfield, MA)

The lyric, "Mr. Fred Blassie and the breakfast mess" refers to Kaufman's movie My Breakfast With Blassie. This was the movie that Kaufman was filming when he met his girlfriend. (thanks, Patrick - Tallapoosa, GA)

On an edition of the British TV show Top Of The Pops 2, Michael Stipe claimed that when writing this song, it was a tribute to Kurt Cobain's lyrics and writing, and that the repeated "yeah yeah yeah yeah" at the end of most lines is actually his attempt at putting more "yeahs" in a song than Cobain did. Stipe claimed Cobain was the master at making them fit, and he wanted to out-do him. (thanks, Liam - London, England)

R.E.M. performed this with Eddie Vedder when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.

After R.E.M. called it quits in 2011, Michael Stipe said that this would be the song he would most miss performing, particularly "watching the effect of that opening bass line on a sea of people at the end of a show," he told Rolling Stone. "That is an easy song to sing. It's hard to sing a bad note in it," he added.

In the liner notes for Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011, Peter Buck recalled how the music for this song came together: "'Man on the Moon' was something that Bill [Berry] had this one chord change that he came in with, which was C to D like the verse of the song, and he said, 'I don't know what to do with that.' I used to finish some of Bill's things ... he would come up with the riffs, but I would be the finish guy for that. I sat down and came up with the chorus, the bridges, and so forth. I remember we showed it to Mike and Michael when they came in later; definitely we had the song finished. I think Bill played bass and I played guitar; we kept going around with it. I think we might have played some mandolin on it in the rehearsal studio."

Peter Care directed the music video on location near the Antelope Valley area of California. Stipe, wearing a cowboy hat, hitches a ride with Bill Berry to a truck stop. Once there, they meet Care tending bar while Mike Mills plays pool, and the cast of customers joins in singing the song's chorus. The late Andy Kaufman even makes an appearance on the truck stop's television set as the video ends.

R.E.M. Songs - Everybody Hurts Lyrics

R.E.M. - Everybody Hurts

R.E.M. - Everybody Hurts Youtube Music Videos and Lyrics

Album: Automatic For The People
Released: 1992

Everybody Hurts Lyrics

Everybody Hurts Song Chart

Most of this song was written by R.E.M. drummer Bill Berry. He quit the band in 1997 shortly before recording their album Up. After that album, the band almost broke up, but decided to continue as a trio. Berry became a farmer.

This is an anti-suicide song. Berry wanted to reach out to people who felt they had no hope.

On many R.E.M. songs, Michael Stipe purposefully sings indecipherably. He sang very clearly on this, however, because he didn't want his message getting lost. "I don't remember singing it," he noted in Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011, "but I still kind of can't believe my voice is on this recording. It's very pure. This song instantly belonged to everyone except us, and that honestly means the world to me."

While Berry wrote this, he did not actually play on it. A Univox drum machine took care of that for him. R.E.M. bass player Mike Mills claims he bought the drum machine for $20, but it was perfect for the song's "metronome-ish feel." He told Pulse magazine in 1992: "Mike (Stipe) and I cut it live with this dumb drum machine which is just as wooden as you can get. We wanted to get this flow around that: human and non-human at the same time."

The string arrangement was done by Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones.

The Nevada legislature commended R.E.M. for "encouraging the prevention of teen suicides," noting this as an example. Nevada has a high rate of teen suicide.

The music video was directed by Jake Scott, son of movie director Ridley Scott, famous for movies like Blade Runner (1982) and Gladiator (2000). Filmed on Interstate 10 in San Antonio, Texas, the clip is set during a traffic jam where people's thoughts are revealed through subtitles.

The album title was inspired by Weaver D's soul food diner in Athens, Georgia. When you ordered food there, they answered by saying "automatic." They had a sign that said "Delicious Fine Foods - Automatic For The People."

A very moving mix of this song was made using sound bites from the 9-11 disaster. (thanks, Andy - Halifax, England)

This was used on an episode of The Simpsons when Marge is walking in a thunderstorm and thinks she has no friends. (thanks, Dawson - Draper, UT)

Peter Buck wrote in the liner notes of the album In Time - The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003 that "the reason the lyrics are so atypically straightforward is because it was aimed at teenagers."

In February 2010 a charity cover was recorded by a collection of artists, Helping Haiti, to raise money for the victims of the earthquake that devastated the country. It sold over 200,000 copies in its first two days making it one of the quickest selling singles of the 21st century in the United Kingdom.

This topped a poll compiled by PRS For Music, which collects and pays royalties to musicians in the UK, of the songs most likely to make a grown man cry. Second in the list came Eric Clapton's "Tears In Heaven" followed by Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." PRS chairman Ellis Rich said: "From this chart, it is clear that a well-written tear-jerker is one that people can relate to and empathise with. It is this lyrical connection that can reach deep down emotionally and move even the strongest of men."

In a rare authorized comedic use of this song, Mayim Bialik's character on The Big Bang Theory plays this on the harp when she is upset over being left behind by her two girlfriends, who are shopping for bridesmaids dresses. Her "boyfriend," played by Jim Parsons, comes by to cheer her up, resulting in an awkward cuddle scene.

Peter Buck likens the vibe of this song to Otis Redding's "Pain in My Heart." He wrote in the liner notes for Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011: "I'm not sure if Michael would have copped that reference, but to a lot of our fans it was a Staxxy-type thing."

This was used in the 1992 film version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, starring Kristy Swanson, Luke Perry and Rutger Hauer. Speaking of the subsequent TV series, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Peter Buck said: "I've never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but the idea that high school is a portal to hell seems pretty realistic to me."

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