2000 Great Songs #1444: Me In Honey

There are probably a few R.E.M. songs I haven't hit yet which I like more than "Me In Honey"--yes, I could take nearly every song from their first couple albums before I stray into something else--but the closing track from 1991's Out Of Time has always felt special to me. As I've repeated ad nauseum both in these parts and in my book, R.E.M. was truly a life-changing band for me, particularly those early IRS albums, which were just a huge part of my musical life in college. But 1988's Green, their first album after I graduated college (and first for Warner Bros.), didn't hit me the same way. It was still a good, maybe even great album, but it didn't have the same emotional tug, and I wondered at the time if they were maybe a part of my college years and it was time to move on. It didn't help that there was more than a two-year wait for the follow-up, an agonizingly long time for a band which had been releasing new music every year since their 1982 debut EP.

But in early 1991, I remember seeing a clip on MTV (maybe 120 Minutes?) of the band working on a new song in the studio, with Kate Pierson of the B-52's on backing vocals, and it sounded pretty great. That song turned out to be "Me In Honey," and while it didn't get the same attention when the record came out as "Losing My Religion," and was less interesting than some other cuts (I really loved the partially spoken-word "Belong"), something about the song's insistent riff, or maybe just that sneak preview, made in my immediate favorite. And, yeah, it's a really insistent riff--the song's a little repetitive musically--but somehow it still works. Pierson's vocal certain helps (not that Mills doesn't do a bang-up job on stage), as do Stipe's lyrics, a cryptic (it's always cryptic) break-up song that suggests it's a little more complicated than that.

Live 1995:

Live 2005:

Quivers cover (from their terrific Out Of Time tribute):

Kyle Richards cover:

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