Music
With Reckoning, Dixon and Easter wanted to capture the energy of R.E.M.'s live sound. Dixon had not seen the band perform live before working on Murmur; after he had done so, he had a greater sense of the band's strengths and weaknesses. Dixon wanted the guitars to sound more like they did in concert, but at first met resistance from both the band and the label. However, by the time R.E.M. started to record, Dixon said the group "wanted to rock out a bit more".
Dixon was enamored of the technique of binaural recording, and used it extensively on the album. Easter recalled that Dixon "made this sort of fake binaural head out of a cardboard box and stuck two microphones in it" to record the group. In Easter's opinion, the method made drummer Bill Berry's parts "fresher sounding". Binaural recording also allowed bassist Mike Mills' backing vocals to be loud without covering up Stipe's lead vocals. Dixon explained, "Mike Mills was often singing 12 to 15 feet away from the microphones that were recording his part, but because it was in a studio binaural field, we would tend to hear him as behind ."
Biographer David Buckley wrote, "While the music moved away from Murmur's slightly airless feel, the subject matter was a little darker." Buck noted in a 1988 interview that water imagery was abundant in the album. Buckley interpreted that imagery as representing the change presented by the band's increasing success, as well as the changing music scene of group's Athens, Georgia hometown. The song "Camera" addressed the death of a friend from Athens who died in a car crash. Easter said, " vocal was so exposed on that track, and because of that, it could really show any technical imperfections with regard to pitch." The producer tried to get Stipe to sing a better take, but the singer was more intent on getting the feeling of the song across, and at one point refused to record further. While many of the album's songs were new compositions, some had been in R.E.M.'s show setlists for years. In particular, "Pretty Persuasion" and "(Don't Go Back to) Rockville" had been played live as far back as October 1980. The band was reluctant to record "Pretty Persuasion" as the members considered it too old, but Dixon and Easter convinced the group to do so. R.E.M. originally intended to release "(Don't Go Back to) Rockville" as a non-album single between Reckoning and its next release. When the band recorded it for the album, the group rearranged the song from its live incarnation and gave it country music feel in tribute to its lawyer Bertis Downs, IV, who was a country fan.
Read more about this topic: Reckoning (R.E.M. album)
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.... Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
—Harper Lee (b. 1926)
“As if, as if, as if the disparate halves
Of things were waiting in a betrothal known
To none, awaiting espousal to the sound
Of right joining, a music of ideas, the burning
And breeding and bearing birth of harmony,
The final relation, the marriage of the rest.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“On the first days, like a piece of music that one will later be mad about, but that one does not yet distinguish, that which I was to love so much in [Bergotte’s] style was not yet clear to me. I could not put down the novel that I was reading, but I thought that I was only interested in the subject, as in the first moments of love when one goes every day to see a woman at some gathering, or some pastime, by the amusements to which one believes to be attracted.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)