Pop Songs 07-08 encores with a rare version of Michael Stipe

A week ago, Matthew Fluxblog wrapped up (for the time being) Pop Songs 07-08 with a post about R.E.M.’s It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine). Pop Songs has been a favourite blog of mine since its inception so it was with kind of mixed feelings that I greeted Matthew’s final post.

Over the course of the last 18 months or so, Matthew has written about every R.E.M. song in thoughtful, insightful mini-essays. I loved reading each post even if it was about a song I didn’t like. In fact, Matthew’s championing of much of Monster led me to go back to that record earlier this year for the first time in ages. And I’ve totally rediscovered that album. So thanks for that, Matthew.

To top it all off, Matthew has managed to get Michael Stipe on board this week for an ongoing series of posts as Michael has been responding to emails sent in to Pop Songs. It’s fascinating reading as Michael – a man whose lyrics are notoriously surreal/impressionistic/difficult/etc – is getting into specifics when answering questions about certain songs. He’s even straightening out lyrics for people.

A must for any R.E.M. fan.

And I’ve just realized I still haven’t written about Accelerate here. It’s a great record, go buy it.

Man-Sized Wreath

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 8:12 pm and is filed under General, Rediscovered, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.