You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
R.E.M. was formed in Athens, Georgia in 1980 by singer Michael Steip, bassist Mike Mills, guitarist Peter Buck and drummer Bill Berry. They've won three Grammys and have sold over 85 million records. In 1992, the band released their eighth album, Automatic for the People. And in honor of the 25th anniversary of its release, in this episode, Michael Steip and Mike Mills take apart the song Try Not to Breathe.
Session is mine, I have left it for life. These are the eyes that I want you to remember. I'm Michael Steip, having worked together for at this point 11 years as a band. The guys were trying really hard to throw roadblocks in front of themselves to not write on the same instruments.
This is Mike Mills. The genesis of this song was Peter's desire to experiment with different stringed instruments. He was working a lot with anything he could get his hands on that wasn't an electric guitar. And this started on the Delsimer. The Delsimer was something Peter was really enjoying playing at that point and we'd like the gothic Southern quality of that sound. Then he adds some steel string acoustic guitar. That's where you get that beautiful quasi-western sound.
What you've got there is two of Peter's favorite musical types. You have surf and you have a spaghetti western, the good, the bad, and the ugly. You change the instrument, you change the reverb on it a little bit and you wind up with something that sounds like neither of those things. I generally played most of the keyboards on R&M stuff. The organ part there was deliberately like a call and answer. There's movement in the right hand to begin and then the left hand answers.
And so they're almost talking to each other. That sounds like one of those thoughtful sad kind of church songs. It's what Mike and I came from. Mike's father Frank was an opera singer who sang in church and I came from a long line of Methodist preachers. We have that kind of Protestant, the sad beauty of Jesus, and it's kind of a part of our upbringing.
Over the course of our 31 years as a band, the creative process was, those guys would give me music and I would then find a melody and then a lyric that went along with the music that they'd given me. It's just the three of us working to write a song, but sometimes Michael was in the room and when he was very often things that the band might have glossed over and said, well, that's not really much of anything. Michael would say, hold on, I like that. Keep working on that.
Most of our demo work was done in Athens. We have a rehearsal studio and we would write the songs there and get them all pretty much fleshed out enough to show Michael what the song was and enough to give him a foundation for coming up with words and melody. Here's the original demo for Try Not to Breathe. I see music more than hear it. A great instrumental track is an extremely cinematic journey for me.
The song to me felt like it had this kind of heaving motion of a boat rocking on the ocean. Also, it could feel very much like someone breathing or trying to stop breathing. I can tell you what the song is about. I've never really said it, but my grandmother was at the end of her life. My father's mother, grandma's type, her name is Laura. She was 87. She had lived a long life and not an easy one, but she was very, very dear to me.
One of the things that I inherited from her is this shivering thing that happens. This kind of shiver that normal people would get when they get cold or when they think of something really scary. She would get on a daily basis and so did I, and I don't give them as much as I used to, but that was a big part of migrating up and acknowledging and recognizing that I had gotten that very directly from my grandmother. After Michael would sing a song very often, things would change in a major way.
The percussion was often determined by what we heard or didn't hear happening after Michael sang. The percussion part on this is some sort of shaker and then there's that triangle being played. I like to say this about Bill. He was one of the most orchestral drummers in rock and roll. He didn't just get in there and bash out a drum thing. He would listen and write a drum part for the song. It's not a pattern. He would play very musical drum parts. I want you to remember.
We are with melodic band, but we love noise. We love feedback. We like to use feedback because it's so chaotic and unpredictable and it's balsy, it's angry. It was a really good counter to the pretty in our songs to have this grindy chaotic noise. I think it's a great way to have this kind of bridge. He would put down some guitar track for me to sing on top of it. I don't want to say anything else.
You get a lot of bridges where I'm just moning along with whatever Peter put down as a guitar. We're talking about a song about the end of someone's life and they're suggesting to their family. I want to do this my way. I want to make it easier on you. It might be harder on me or it might be easier on me. I don't know, but let's go for it.
It's a very, very emotionally difficult moment and I wanted the voice to portray that. So the way my voice cracks when I hit the word hold, absolutely intentional to leave that in. I will try not to breathe. I can hold my head still with my hands and my knees. The way the voice quivers at the end of the line is eyes of the eyes of the old. I want to have an emotional experience. That's what I go to music for and that's what I wanted to offer people.
I will try not to breathe. This decision is mine. I have lived a full life. And these are the eyes that I want you to remember. Something to fly, something to breathe. Those backing vocals that I sing are actually one of my favorite moments from the entire Arian recording career. Something to breathe. I knew that that song needed a background part there or some sort of vocal melody and so I told everybody else to go away because it might take a while.
I went out and tried to record some ideas and I just did all these things, a bunch of things and nothing was really working, nothing was great. And then all of a sudden I hit that melody with those words. I need something to fly. And Scott and I. That's Scott Litt who produced the album. We made eye contact. We both knew right away. That was exactly what we were looking for. Something to breathe. Something to breathe. I have seen things you will never see.
And that is Bill Berry. One of the great unsung backing vocals is to all time. What was behind the decision to make his vocals sound like that? That was me. I went Scott. Let's make this sound like an old radio voice from the 1940s. Video killed the radio star kind of vocal. They took the credit for your second symphony. We read the wide machine on your technology.
I always loved that. And so for background vocals, if there was an opportunity or a chance to throw something like that in, I would ask for that. It sounds to me like the Greek chorus. It sounds like a kind of a voice of God that's overlooking from above. I have seen things you will never see. I have seen things that you will never see. I pulled that line from the original Blade Runner. I have seen things you people wouldn't believe.
I brought the climatic death scene of the Android Roy Batty into my grandmother's voice to create this beautiful kind of narrative. Time to die. The record became a lot about death and passage and transition. Looking at where America was and where the world was in 1991 and 1992 when we were working on this. The whole world was in great transition. The Berlin Wall had just come down. The Soviet Union was basically dissolved. In America, we were at the end of the Reagan and Bush senior years.
I had watched an entire community decimated by AIDS and the AIDS epidemic. I had grandparents who were at the end of their lives. For us, we were in our early 30s. We had made it through our 20s, which I never expected to have happened. I thought that I was going to die before I made it to 30. Here I was looking at that from the other side. That was reflected in the themes that dominated the making of automatic for the people.
But it's not just death and it's not all darkness. There's lightness and humor and levity and they're hopefully in transition. A door closes and another one opens. And now here's Try Not to Breathe by REM in its entirety. So try Not to Breathe. I can hold my head still with my hands and my knees. There's eyes of the eyes of the old. A shivering bow. I will try Not to Breathe. This decision is mine. I have left a full eye. These are the eyes that I want you to remember.
I need something to fly over my grave. I need something to breathe. I will try Not to Burn. I can hold these inside. I will hold my breath until all these shivers subside. Just look in my eyes. I will try Not to worry. I will see things that you will never see. Leave it to memory me. I should have agreed. I want you to remember. I need something to fly over my grave. I need something to breathe. Maybe don't shiver. Why don't you shiver?
I need something to fly over my grave. I need something to breathe. I will try Not to worry. I will see things that you will never see. Leave it to memory me. I don't dare me to breathe. I want you to remember. I need something to fly over my grave. I need something to breathe. I need something to breathe. I need something to breathe. I want you to remember. To learn more, visit www.songexploder.net-rm.
You'll find a link on the site to buy the 25th anniversary edition of Automatic for the People. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace, an all-in-one platform where you can make a website that's beautiful and effective. I use Squarespace a lot. Most recently I used it for the website for BookExploder, which you can check out at bookexploder.com. I started with one of Squarespace's design templates and then I customized the layout, the fonts, and the colors. It was all easy to do.
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Go to the app or Play Store to download it now. And for 10% off your first year's membership, go to distrokit.com slash VIP slash song exploder. Song Exploder is produced by me, along with Christian Kunz, with help from internal Olivia Wood. Carlos Larma creates original illustrations for each episode of the podcast. You can see those on the song exploder website.
Special thanks this episode to Zach McNeese for engineering the REM interview. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radio Topia from PRX, a curated network of fiercely independent podcasts made possible by listeners like you. Learn more about all the shows at radiotopia.fm. If you want to share your thoughts on this episode or on the podcast in general, you can find Song Exploder on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Song Exploder.
This is the 125th episode of Song Exploder. It's the end of the fourth year of the podcast. Thanks so much to those of you who have been listening since the beginning. And thanks to all the artists who are guests this year for trusting me with their stories and their music. My name is Rishi Keish Hereway. Until next year, thanks for listening. Radio Topia from PRX.