In a studio outside Minneapolis, during the final mixing of Out of Time, three members of R.E.M. began sketching songs that wouldn't fit that album's bright, mandolin-led mood. The band was at a peak: their previous record was still climbing charts worldwide. But guitarist Peter Buck had started pulling the group somewhere quieter. Those loose demos, cut in the winter of 1990, became the seed of Automatic for the People, the eighth studio album by the Athens, Georgia alternative rock band. R.E.M. released Automatic for the People on October 5, 1992.
A rock record that turned inward
R.E.M. had planned to make a rock record. After the glossy pop of Out of Time, Buck wanted a harder, more electric sound. Instead, the sessions turned inward. Singer Michael Stipe skipped the early rehearsals where Buck, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry traded instruments, Buck picking up a mandolin, Mills moving to piano and organ. When Stipe received the demos in early 1992, he heard music that was mid-tempo, acoustic, organ-heavy, with far fewer drums than anyone expected.
The band decamped to Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, New York, with co-producer Scott Litt. There the album took its final, somber shape. Stipe said the themes of loss and mourning came from the feeling of nearing thirty, an age when friends and family start disappearing. One song, Try Not to Breathe, was written about his dying grandmother. The atmosphere was heavy, but the arrangements were lush: former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones wrote string parts for four songs, including Drive and Everybody Hurts, and conductor George Hanson led the players.
A diner sign and a Miami star
The title came from a sign in an Athens diner, Weaver D's Delicious Fine Foods, whose motto promised service that was 'automatic for the people.' The cover showed a star from a motel sign on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, a star that was later wrecked by Hurricane Andrew and no longer exists. The image matched the music: a little faded, a little broken, but still glowing. Released in early October 1992, the album reached number two on the Billboard 200 in the United States and topped the UK Albums Chart.
R.E.M. did not tour behind Automatic for the People. The record was too fragile, too intimate for arenas, and the band chose to let it speak for itself. It worked. The album sold more than 18 million copies worldwide, becoming the group's biggest commercial success. Six singles were pulled from it, though none captured the record's strange, mournful heart quite like the full sequence did.
Critics heard the shift. Rolling Stone's Paul Evans called the album darker and more complex in its beauty. Years later the same magazine would place it among its 500 greatest albums of all time, and in a list of the best records of the 1990s it sat at number 18. The album earned a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year, though it lost to the soundtrack of The Bodyguard, Whitney Houston's blockbuster.
What makes Automatic for the People endure is the tension inside it: a band trying to rock harder and instead making its quietest, slowest, most sorrowful work. Peter Buck, the man who pushed for the new direction, later admitted he was never thrilled with one of its poppiest songs, The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite. But that song, with its interpolation of The Lion Sleeps Tonight, still became a hit. The album's real legacy is quieter: it showed that a rock band at the height of its fame could choose to whisper, and the world would lean in to listen.
The album's real legacy is quieter: it showed that a rock band at the height of its fame could choose to whisper, and the world would lean in to listen.