This may have been the song that immediately made me such a rabid fan. And as I was reminded when Rhett Miller came to the Paste studio and played “Driver 8,” there are some mighty fine songs in R.E.M.’s 30-year oeuvre. But Accelerate was a fine return to form. Rumors flew that the band would play its last show on New Year’s Eve of 1999, and while they plowed on into the new millennium, the ‘00s haven’t been as kind to R.E.M. albums, eventually on CD, even as the quartet became a trio when Bill Berry departed. I felt sheltered, even betrayed, learning that all this music had been made during my adolescence-just up the road in Athens-while I was mowing the lawn to Foreigner 4. And when that was exhausted, I started looking for other bands that just sounded something like R.E.M. Soon after discovering Document, I had worked my way back through every cassette in their catalog. If there was a single band that shaped my teenage ears, that shook me from the confines of classic rock radio and awakened me to quirky, adventuresome college rock, it was R.E.M.
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