How to Write an Early R.E.M. Song

It seems fairly to easy to write a parody of someone else's style: as clever as Weird Al Yankovic can be, no one would mistake his song parodies for the real thing, or for an actual song by the band. But it's probably more interesting, more challenging, and in many ways more fun, to try to write a song (or at least lyrics) that sound as if they might be an actual song by a particular musician. Get good enough, and you might actually write one of their songs...or so Borges might say.

Anyway, a friend of mine has taken to forwarding some of the more interesting and intriguing alt-texts from spam. (This is a sort of productive recycling, pulling at least amusement out of the trash of the internet.) One in particular reminded me very much of the sort of thing Michael Stipe might have sung in the early days of R.E.M. - and it joined up with a few stray phrases that had been rattling around my brain for quite a while to become the kernel of the idea to try to write a pseudo-R.E.M. lyric. The goals were obliqueness, suggestiveness, and a certain kind of truncated, telescoped diction in which certain words or phrases are elided, either because they're almost obvious (and therefore unnecessary to include) or because leaving them out allows for other possibilities. At first, proceeding in this way, I had no idea what the song was "about." Curiously, at some point I realized that everything I'd written, borrowed, or stolen cohered for me - and I knew what I was writing about. Perhaps more curiously, finishing the song after that became much more difficult, because it was tempting to become obvious and direct (which, given the stylistic constraints suggested by my inspiration, would have ruined it). I found the composing process worked best if I didn't think too hard about it, if I sort of let phrases pop into my head. I also decided that I wouldn't try to work things into any regular meter: one of the charms of Stipe's phrasing back then is the way he staggers his rhythm to fit varying syllables into the same sonic time-space.

Aside from the spam alt-text (themselves borrowed from H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau and Orestes A. Brownson's The American Republic: I did some googling), lines are from a Robert Johnson lyric in that two-disc Columbia box from a few years back (I think they got it wrong, but the wrong lyric is more interesting than the right one) and an illustration in the latest issue of Magnet magazine. I rather like the results - now all I have to do is dust off my guitar and pretend to be the rest of the band... Instead, I used a phrase as the title of a mix CD, and scrawled most of the rest of the lyric as a visual element on the cover: results are posted here at the Art of the Mix site.

Intriguingly, when I went back to the original forwarded spam alt-text, I realized that I shouldn't use all of the Brownson quote: even though the song began with what seemed like random phrases, the original context of the Brownson passage proved to be relevant enough that quoting it in full nearly gave the game away (i.e., turned it into a later R.E.M. lyric), so I chipped away half of each phrase. (Curious readers are directed here, for the full spam alt-text.)

ANNOTATE THE CAPSTONE AND PREPARE
THREE DAYS WALK
MILK SCATTERED COWS

MARCH TO GROTTO
BANJO FENCE
WHO NEEDS CALAMINE
AIR TO BLUR AND SETTLE
I CAN STUDY RAIN

TESTIFIED TO THE PUMA
I SAW MONTGOMERY WINCE
NAIL THE WIND TO THE WATER
TIE THE FLAME TO THE GROUND

SIGN YOUR NAME ON THE SHATTERED
CART BEFORE
SWEPT BEHIND

MARCH TO GROTTO
BANJO FENCE
WHO NEEDS CALAMINE
AIR TO BLUR AND SETTLE
I CAN STUDY RAIN

TESTIFIED TO THE PUMA (STATE WHO
I SAW MONTGOMERY WINCE (UNDER THE OLD
NAIL THE WIND TO THE WATER (I CAN STUDY
TIE THE FLAME TO THE GROUND (STATE WHO