Lifes Rich Pageant (1986)

In software development circles, a "1.0 person" is someone who likes to be in on the start of a project. To be a 1.0 person is a badge of honor. You are an innovator or inventor, creating the future. By contrast, I have found I am more of a "4.0 person"—my term for preferring to wait to work with something until it has had the bugs thoroughly worked out but is not yet bloatware. A 4.0 person is no badge of honor, of course, but it saves me a lot of glitchy beta-testing headaches. I know I can take this to extremes—it took me 10 years to get wi-fi, and I only recently finally got a smartphone, which technically I think makes me more like a 13.0 person. I mention this because I noticed Lifes Rich Pageant is the fourth album by R.E.M., a band I've never been entirely easy with. But I certainly loved this album more than any of their others. They perfected a certain R.E.M. look and feel here. I hasten to say the 1.0 / 4.0 thing falls apart a bit when you consider I did like "Radio Free Europe" and the Chronic Town EP quite a bit. Murmur was where I fell out of step on this journey although I have since made my peace with that album—not bad! But the next two seemed weak and weaker and I thought I was done with R.E.M. when Lifes Rich Pageant came along. Wikipedia declares it a bridge between R.E.M.'s alt-rock origins and their later commercial fortunes as the wise old alt-men of the '90s. I'm not even sure how I came to own Lifes Rich Pageant, but once it was in my house it was on all the time for months. It starts a bit slow but with the third track, "Fall on Me," it takes off into open-hearted soulful regions they had never really embraced before, though you can hear the origins of it in "So. Central Rain (I'm Sorry)" from Reckoning. I really loved that song too and then used it up until Lifes Rich Pageant came along, which I went ahead and used up too. I mean, it was nice to revisit it a few more times recently, but it hasn't changed much in the years since I played it lot. It's one of those things that seem smaller with time, perhaps, like your old grade school. Stipe's singing and the songwriting let loose in nice big ways that had seemed small and guarded before. It felt liberating and revelatory at the time. It's easier to make out the words, and they're more heartfelt: "Don't FAA-AAALLL on meeee" and "CuyahOOOga" and "Eye YAM Superman." It's a groove album—most of the songs are basically in the same one—and if I can only hear memories now of what I used to love at least I've got, etc. For a year or two, until Document, I could feel more onboard with the legions of fans who adore and still adore this odd classic rock band.