we can reach our destination but it's still a ways away

[jlh]

R.E.M. albums in order of personal listening preference, not including the ones released after Bill Berry left the band.

1. Fables of the Reconstruction
   
2. Reckoning
   
3. Murmur
   
4. Lifes Rich Pageant
   
5. Automatic for the People
   
6. Document
   
7. New Adventures in Hi-Fi
   
8. Monster
   
9. Out of Time
   
10. Green

Note that Chronic Town is an EP and therefore is choice "A", but with five songs is maybe not fair to compare to albums of 9-12 songs.

Songs you should get if all you have of the IRS years (that is, the records before Green) is Eponymous.

• Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars)
  
• Pilgrimage
  
• Moral Kiosk
  
• Perfect Circle
  
• 7 Chinese Bros.
  
• Pretty Persuasion
  
• Little America
  
• Feeling Gravitys Pull
  
• Maps and Legends
  
• Green Grow the Rushes
  
• These Days
  
• Cuyahoga
  
• I Believe
  
• Just a Touch
  
• Swan Swan H
  
• Welcome to the Occupation
  
• Exhuming McCarthy
  
• Fireplace

Best case scenario, of course, you should get the older stuff, as it accounts for 5 of my top 6 albums by the band.

I don't have room to talk about what R.E.M. has meant to me, and I'll just sound like an old annoying creaky Xer if I did anyway, but I'll give you a few moments that will always be vivid in my memory:

1. Hanging out in the music room singing the entire Fables album with my still-BFF C, who was teaching himself how to play guitar. He would play the opening bass line of "Old Man Kensey" in jazz band to get my attention, "Driver 8" because he liked hearing me sing it (he'd sing the Mike Mills part, starting our tradition of my singing lower than him), and the opening of "Feeling Gravitys Pull" outside the room when I was taking my sax lesson when he felt like being a jerk because he was a 15-year-old boy and that was his job.
   
2. Seeing R.E.M. for the first time on the Pageant tour. Still have the t-shirt. The guys behind us screamed out "Box Cars!" between every song; I hadn't heard Chronic Town yet so I didn't know what they were talking about--nor had I been to enough R.E.M. shows to know that they never played their own old songs, and would be more likely to play a Pylon cover no one had ever heard. At that show they played stuff off Fables and Pageant, but nothing older.
   
3. Freshman year of college we made a list of records that at least one person in every rooming group owned, and one of them was Document. Everyone was abuzz about what the new on-a-major-label record would sound like.
   
4. That said, one of my favorite things about IRS records in the early 80s is that their roster included both R.E.M. and the Go-Gos.
   
   Have some super old R.E.M., when everyone was young and had more hair, including David Letterman.