There's no one left to take the lead
R.E.M. - 'Find The River' (Automatic For The People - 1992)
Life, it’s bigger
So begins R.E.M.’s 1991 single ‘Losing My Religion’, a song that helped propel them from a cult indie band on a newly minted major record deal to one of the biggest stadium rock bands in the world1. In the summer of 1991, the song was huge as far as these things go. The parent album, Out of Time, would chart in the US, the UK and many other countries at the top of the charts.
While listening to the closing track on that album’s follow up Automatic For The People, the 1992 album that for many people is R.E.M. I was drawn to that opening phrase and how it fits alongside that album’s closer, ‘Find The River’. In it, the protagonist contemplates his journey through life into death (the river into the ocean flows) and considers his memories and the new ones that the recipient of his wisdom has to look forward to.
For many people, the song is intrinsically linked with the penultimate track on the album, ‘Nightswimming’ there’s an obvious connection with the water element in both, but that nostalgia for the innocent pursuits of youth and the recklessness of those times sound like the type of wistful nostalgia that our ‘Find The River’ protagonist is thinking about as they reach the other end of the journey.
Both songs were recorded in late 1990 while Out Of Time was being mixed; 2017’s 25th-anniversary edition of Automatic For The People contains a demo, known as ‘10K minimal’, where the ballad-like music of ‘Find The River’ is almost fully formed, Mike Mills found the chords messing around2 and at this point, Micheal Stipe is oohing, humming and ahhing in place of the lyrics we are familiar with.
One of the fascinating elements of the whole album is how Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones arranged the strings on a handful of tracks, subtle yet sweeping. They give such space for the songs to radiate that when they are absent, as they are here, a simple mellotron, piano and organ do the job of setting a similar atmosphere - they even sneak in the sea’s favourite instrument, the accordion, and it doesn’t sound trite. Either in final or demo form, it is effortless to imagine a Huckleberry Finn type character floating down a river, straw in hat and mouth, as the song plays.
The sense I get from the lyrics is that they are a quiet rallying call for us all to seek out those quiet moments in life. After an album full of reflections on reaching your thirties, mental health, politics, the environment and other precarious elements which still ring true today, “stop and smell the roses” is quite an excellent way to go out. There is a calmness and acceptance in the way the narrator sings of the knowledge that someone they care about is off to find their way in the world and make a lifetime of memories.
Micheal Stipe has said;
"Find the River to me, has a lot of emotional baggage. It doesn't have that much to do with anything that would make sense to anyone else but me, particularly. I know the place I wrote it. I know the connections I had with it when I wrote it. I know connections that came afterwards, people that died. So yes, I can sing that song... but we've tried and tried to work it into some form which will translate live and for whatever reason we can't seem to play it. It's like a curse."
Looking at setlist.fm they have played it three times less than ‘Nightswimming’ and ‘Everybody Hurts’ and only a quarter of the times that they played ‘Man On The Moon’. Given that the band played 25 times from 1990-to 1994 before 1995’s tour in support of Monster, and they only played it five times in 120+ shows, there’s certainly something to the idea that this was a song too much for America’s Biggest rock band to do something with.
The lyrics speak of handing over the baton from one generation to another; the way Stipe sings “…all of this is coming your way” telegraphs how much the journey should be savoured. Even the fact the song isn’t verse-chorus-verse might be a suggestion that the music is reflecting the uncertain path of life. It also touches on the impact of smell on memory and how the two interplay, references to the rose of hay3, bayberry, bergamot and vetiver. They’ve reached the point where they can no longer look up to an elder statesperson, but they are now in that position, and handing over the baton is part of the final journey.
I’ve often imagined that if I am still around in 45-50 years, I could be sitting in a driverless car visiting old haunts and the locations of my life. I’ll be thinking about ‘Find The River’ if I do.
Or was that R.E.O. Speedwagon?
R.E.M. on Radio X’s X-Posure, November 2017
More than most bands, REM seems to put a lot of effort into the last song on a record. So many can feel like an afterthought, but on an REM album they always feel intentional, like a denouement.