Putting together a perfect playlist of REM songs is a daunting task. The first issue I ran into is many of their albums are burnt into memory via side A/side B order. To grab a song here or there and dump them into a pile just feels wrong. Yet, Spotify makes wrong easy. It still takes some time to assemble. After piling all of my selections into the playlist, it adds up to exactly three hours. Over the last few days, I’ve been giving the list a test run on walks, drives, and garage puttering. I set the list to alphabetical order, which feels random enough.

How did I select the songs? Most of my favorites are based on places, road-trips, and the people who surrounded me at the time, especially during the 1980’s. Their music is a memory-jogging, timestamped imprint in my mind. REM is/was the quintessential college rock band and rose to fame while I was in college (sooo long ago) - so it is interesting how fresh the memories are when I listen to this playlist.

Spotify Playlist Link

REM albums by release date:
Chronic Town (1981)
Murmur (1983)
Reckoning (1984)
Fables of the Reconstruction (1985)
Lifes Rich Pageant (1986)
Document (1987)
Dead Letter Office (1987)
Green (1988)
Out of Time (1991)
Automatic for the People (1992)
Monster (1994)
New Adventures in Hi-Fi (1996)
Up (1998)
Reveal (2001)
Around the Sun (2004)
Accelerate (2008)
Collapse into Now (2011) - nothing from this album made the list