My Top 1000 Songs #46: Radio Free Europe

Repeat visitors to these parts, or the handful of you who actually checked out my book, don't need to hear me flog the "R.E.M. Changed My Life!" horse yet again.

Let's just say that "Radio Free Europe," the opening track on 1983's Murmur, has never been just a song for me. It's a proclamation. A celebration. A whole-hearted, full-throated embrace of the new. An entry point to a bold alternate musical universe, one I always suspected had to be there but just needed to be shown the door.

Four kids on Letterman!