I’ve been in the mood for the R.E.M. sound lately for some reason, and right now I’m listening to the Automatic For The People album because I do think it’s their best.
And I just remembered that this was apparently the album Kurt Cobain was listening to before his death. (Courtney apparently found the CD player still on with this album in the changer.) And it just makes me wonder, because the album itself is so sad in actual melody, with most stuff in minor key and sort of mildly slow, but some of the songs are like an attempt to encourage happiness or at least an attempt to encourage searching for happiness, like Everybody Hurts and (to some extent) Monty Got A Raw Deal and Find The River, but then you also have songs like Sweetness Follows and Try Not To Breathe. It makes me wonder if Kurt was trying to pull himself out of whatever sort of desperate mood he was in or if he was listening to it because he felt stuck in that mood and the songs just captured it. Or if he was simply listening to it because he seemed to think of Michael Stipe as a friend (they were discussing doing an album together before he died) and listening to it meant he was hearing the voice of a friend. Or simply because the songs are sort of droning and low so it could be background sound without being overly stimulating or distracting. Or something else entirely.
I don’t know why I started thinking about this. It just makes me wonder, why this album?
This was my favorite album as a teenager for all of the above reasons. I can’t tell you how many times I listened to “Everybody Hurts” to get me through. I loved it even before I heard about the Kurt Cobain connection.