While I enthrall at getting more musical goodies from the band I love, these 25th anniversary releases are making me feel old.
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Today marks the 25th celebration of Fables of the Reconstruction, the third full album by R.E.M. and also my favorite recording by the Athens boys. This follows in line with the band’s release of Murmur and Reckoning, and no doubt I’ll be talking about Pageant and Document in the upcoming years.
But Fables, which recalls the charm and vibrancy of the South, proved to be a watershed recording in my life and changed the way I looked and thought about music. From the opening strings of Feeling Gravity’s Pull to the lingering banjo in Wendell Gee (a song Peter Buck has gone on record saying he hated, but how I wish I wrote such wonderful songs), Fables is a winding road of winsome discovery.
I’ve written about this album before, so I won’t go into too much here, suffice to say those albums you hear during your final years of high school stay with you for a lifetime. It was the Fables tour I first saw R.E.M., with two of my best friends, and to this day I will pull out the album (on vinyl, of course) and fill my house with its stories and playful guitar.
For the celebration, R.E.M. is sending out a remastered original album, plus 14 previously unreleased demo recordings. Added in are new liner notes by Buck, who writes some of the best liner notes around. In his liner notes, Peter recalls, “The last day of rehearsal, I think with Joe Boyd in attendance, Jim Hawkins recorded what we had come up with. We spent about four hours recording all the new songs live, with minimal overdubs. I hadn’t listened to this stuff since we recorded it, and I’m kind of stunned at how good it is. My memory of the rehearsals is us scrambling to finish songs. The songs on both Murmur and Reckoning had been performed for months if not years by the time they were committed to tape. I remember feeling dangerously unprepared when we flew to London, but on the evidence of this recording we must have known what we were doing.”
Here’s the tracks on the new release.
Disc One: digitally remastered original album
1. Feeling Gravitys Pull
2. Maps and Legends
3. Driver 8
4. Life and How To Live It
5. Old Man Kensey
6. Cant Get There From Here
7. Green Grow The Rushes
8. Kohoutek
9. Auctioneer (Another Engine)
10. Good Advices
11. Wendell Gee
Disc Two: “The Athens Demos”
1. Auctioneer (Another Engine) [demo version]
2. Bandwagon [demo version] [final version was B-side to "Cant Get There From Here"]
3. Cant Get There From Here [demo version]
4. Driver 8 [demo version]
5. Feeling Gravitys Pull [demo version]
6. Good Advices [demo version]
7. Green Grow The Rushes [demo version]
8. Hyena [demo version] [album version appeared on Life's Rich Pageant]
9. Kohoutek [demo version]
10. Life and How To Live It [demo version]
11. Maps and Legends [demo version]
12. Old Man Kensey [demo version]
13. Throw Those Trolls Away [demo version - previously unreleased]
14. Wendell Gee [demo version]
