Bonus Track: "Nightswimming"
On R.E.M. and a random moment at my parents' piano
Night swimming, under the right circumstances, has to be one of the greatest pleasures of existence. I remember some of us jumping impulsively into the Comal one night when my friends and I were staying in a small tent in the backyard of a house in New Braunfels. And I remember a nighttime swim with my future wife in a swimming hole in Blanco, nobody else around. The joyful terror of jumping into water you can’t see well in the dark. The exhilarating plunge into cold water. Feeling fully awake, fully alive. The freedom of it all. Pure magic.
But this essay isn’t about that. It’s about the R.E.M. song.
When we were seventeen, my friends and I used to drive around a lot. That was our main social activity: driving around, talking, listening to music, wishing we had something better to do. There’d be four or five of us in someone’s Civic or used Explorer, possibly trailed by another used Explorer with additional aimless friends. Me, Matt, Brandon, Brian, and Ronnie. Jeff, Jared, Gerald. No particular place to go.
Most of us were ex-teammates from the freshman basketball days. We were neither cool nor uncool. But we felt uncool, or at least I did, because we hardly ever had anything cool to do.1 Back then I didn’t realize that having nothing much to do is the default social state of high school students everywhere and that one day I’d miss all those nights when we had nothing to do. That’s how it goes: how often do we end up wishing we were doing the thing we didn’t want to be doing at the time?2
Anyway, on one particular night, we were driving around, listening to Automatic for the People. None of us were huge R.E.M. fans. Normally, we listened to classic rock on those drives—Beatles and Stones, Zep and Allmans, Bob and Neil, Van and Bruce—but we could recognize a contemporary classic when we heard one. And Automatic for the People was an indisputable masterpiece.
Looking back, though, it’s a pretty funny album for a carful of young men to be listening to on a Friday night, remarkably soft and melancholy. But maybe those words also describe us at the time, though we didn’t see ourselves that way.
Picture us out there in the Houston suburbs, driving in silence, listening to “Everybody Hurts.”
***
If we were going to ride around listening to any R.E.M. album from that period, it probably should’ve been Monster. That one had loud distorted guitars and a glam-rock confidence that might’ve made us feel temporarily self-assured, waiting at a red light with the windows down on Highway 6. Or we could’ve just rocked “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” on repeat. That would’ve been legitimately fun.3
But I don’t think my buddies and I ever listened to Monster in the car. I do remember listening to it a bunch of times upstairs at Matt’s house on a Discman. I loved that album, but somehow not enough to ever buy it myself.4 Matt was also the only one of us who’d seen R.E.M. live, at a show in the Woodlands (with Radiohead as the opener!). The main detail he reported back was that Michael Stipe held a sheet of lyrics throughout the show and then made a big display of throwing away the pages before they played one of their big hits.5
Later, after discovering Big Star and the Replacements, slowly expanding my range of interest, I’d get into early R.E.M., buying Murmur and listening to it alone in my bedroom, feeling all the album’s college-radio mysteries and staring at the album’s equally mysterious cover, back before I knew what kudzu was. But R.E.M. never became one of those bands that I shaped my identity around. They were just a good band with a lot of good songs. Which, of course, is more than enough.6
But back to Automatic for the People: we listened to the whole album that night, from the first track to the last. (Do teenagers do this anymore?) Our aimless melancholy drive began with “Drive.” Hey, kids, rock and roll, nobody tells you where to go. That was true: nobody told us where to go. I wished someone would, actually.
What did we do during the stretch of sadness-tinged songs that come after that?7 Did we talk about life? Did we joke around? Did we look sadly out the passenger windows? Probably all of the above.
Eventually, though, we made it to the album’s final tracks. “Man on the Moon” was the big one, of course, the song most of us were waiting for, the masterpiece within the masterpiece. When “Man on the Moon” came on, any unspoken sadness that might’ve been hanging over us became a happy sadness. For those five minutes, our lives felt full of meaning, not aimless at all. Let’s play Twister, let’s play Risk. Here’s a truck stop instead of St. Peter’s. Mr. Andy Kaufman’s gone wrestling.
Hey, baby, are you having fun?
***
Ronnie was the only one in the car that night who wasn’t at all a Classic Rock Guy. Nor was he an R.E.M. guy. By the time he was seventeen, he was really into hip-hop, just starting to make his own beats for the first time. The only CD I remember him buying during this period was the new Timbaland & Magoo album. Studying Timbaland’s production.
But he rarely got to choose the music on our aimless drives. I don’t remember anyone ever saying, “Yo, Ronnie, what do you wanna listen to?” In retrospect, this was a collective failure. Good friends don’t perpetually dominate the music choices. Good friends take some interest in their friend’s interests, even when they don’t share those interests. In this respect, we all could’ve been much better friends to Ronnie.8
And so, listening to Automatic for the People that night, I gave no thought to Ronnie’s opinion. When we finally got to “Nightswimming,” I didn’t notice him listening, didn’t know whether he was enjoying it or not. I was busy being caught up in the feeling of that beautiful, emotional, embarrassingly vulnerable song, feeling nostalgic for my lost youth despite being in the very middle of my youth.
“Nightswimming” seems to be about skinny dipping, though Michael Stipe has sometimes disputed this.9 But that’s not relevant here. Unlike you, maybe, I have no high school skinny-dipping memories.10 What’s important, for our purposes, is the song’s beautiful repeating piano part (written by the band’s bassist, Mike Mills). And when the album was over and our night ended, having parted ways with some of our other buddies, driving back to my house, Ronnie said, “I need to learn that piano part.”
“What piano part?” I said.
“From that one song.”
“Which one?”
I put the CD on again, flipped through the tracks until we finally got to it.
“That one.”
Back in my driveway now, still sitting in the car, he made me play it several times. And then we went inside and he went straight to the piano in the living room, a piano that was usually treated more like a piece of furniture than a musical instrument.11 And Ronnie sat there at the piano for a long time, trying to figure out the part from “Nightswimming.”
I finally went upstairs to my room, coming back down every once in a while to check on his progress. He started off with what sounded like random notes, but over time he got closer and closer. It was clear that he wouldn’t leave the piano until he got it right.
Ronnie wasn’t a piano player, by the way. He’d played violin some years earlier, but none of us thought of him as an especially musical person, not at that point. By the end of the night, though, he was sitting at the piano by himself, playing the riff from “Nightswimming” over and over. He’d figured it out.
Suddenly—for me, at least—an unmemorable night became memorable.
***
That memory holds a unique place in my mind for all sorts of reasons. For once, Ronnie had actually found some joy or meaning in my music. (Our lack of interest in each other’s music went both ways, though he had to put up with much more of mine.12) And as someone with very little musical ability, then or now, I witnessed his accomplishment with genuine awe: he’d heard a song that captured his attention and refused to leave the piano until he could play it. And the satisfaction he seemed to get from that moment was purely intrinsic—he wasn’t playing for anyone but himself.
Back then, I had pretty narrow tastes. I mostly turned my ears off to the great and unique qualities of any music outside my preferred boundaries. But Ronnie didn’t turn his ears off—he was open to beauty where he found it, even if it wasn’t his music.
And that quality has served him well. As an adult, he became a hip-hop and pop producer. He was the only one riding in the car that night who ended up co-writing a massive hit for Nicki Minaj.13 More recently, he’s moved into composing music for film and TV, including reboots of a couple shows we watched when we were kids. If you ask me, the “Nightswimming” moment foreshadowed all this.14 And just like he did on that night, he’s refused to stop—in an often brutal, soul-crushing field—continuing to work at it until he gets it right.
A couple weeks ago, Ronnie conducted orchestra performances in LA and NYC for the Grammys. My guy’s also a Grammy-nominee himself. He continues to expand his musical boundaries. I’m still in awe.
And I can only assume that none of this would’ve happened if he hadn’t listened to Automatic for the People in the car with the rest of us when we were seventeen years old.
So: you’re welcome, Ronnie. Even though you claim not to remember that night at all.
The social highlight of my junior year was a strictly platonic dinner at Chili’s with my former 4th grade girlfriend (along with one of my friends and one of her friends) after we ran into each other at a high school basketball game. Or, come to think of it, maybe that was fall of senior year. Which meant my junior year had no social highlights.
There are parents of older children who miss changing diapers. Who even miss the sleepless nights.
“What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” is easily one of the best rock songs of the 90s. And it might be about Houston legend Donald Barthelme! Not that I knew who Barthelme was back then. (Email me if you want a PDF of that article. It’s amazing.)
I still love Monster. The whole album is great—strange, brash, clever, both affected and affecting, even sexy, at least by R.E.M.’s standards (“I’d settle for a cup of coffee, but you know what I really need”). My favorite consecutive-song combination on any R.E.M. album is “Strange Currencies” followed by “Tongue.” I’ve listened to those two songs, collectively, more than a thousand times, easy. If you want a good one-two punch of pure longing, check out that combo.
The particular song has been lost to history. “Everybody Hurts,” maybe? Or possibly “Losing My Religion.” Whatever it was, in Matt’s hilarious telling, the crowd cheered wildly over the fact that Michael Stipe knew all the lyrics to that one song by heart. To be fair, though, I can’t even imagine having to memorize lyrics for so many songs.
Towards the end of high school I got super into “E-Bow the Letter,” a song (featuring Patti Smith) from New Adventures in Hi-Fi. I’d drive around alone, hitting the skip-back button on the CD over and over, needing another hit of the odd, dark, cool, droning, wistful feeling that song captured. (“Will you live to 83? Will you ever welcome me?”) These days, though, my favorite R.E.M. song is “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville.” I can’t get enough of that one.
“Everybody Hurts” is the centerpiece of this stretch, of course, but my favorite might be “Try Not to Breathe.” This episode of Song Exploder, featuring interviews with Stipe and Mills, will make you love the song, whoever you are. Also, this recent NYT magazine profile of Michael Stipe is pretty great. (My favorite Stipe quote from that article: “We are brilliant enough machines that we can sense when something is genuine.”)
We didn’t just do this with Ronnie, unfortunately. Jared loved Pearl Jam, but I was utterly unwilling to listen to Pearl Jam in my car at age seventeen. Gerald loved Dave Matthews Band, and most of our buddies would’ve reacted with snobbery and condescension if you asked them to put on some Dave in the car. Also, Gerald and Brian H. both loved Eminem, which I attempted to tolerate when I rode with them, though I came to consider Slim Shady’s music to be a form of torture.
Like so much of music-related Wikipedia, the page for “Nightswimming” is full of great details. Apparently, Stipe once said the song was about a crazy nightwatchman he hired for the band, while at another point he said it was about “kind of an innocence that's either kind of desperately clung onto or obviously lost.”
I do wonder, though, why we never hung out along the Brazos in those days. It was right there. Not that anyone would ever want to swim in that water, clothed or otherwise.
Classic sign of privilege: owning a piano that nobody plays. By that point, my parents had given up on any hopes that one of us would learn. Eventually, they donated the piano to a church.
Our musical interests did occasionally converge with certain albums, most notably Parliament’s Mothership Connection. What a record.
I won’t say what song it is, but the Internet tells me it has been streamed nearly 800 million times on Spotify. Also: more than 500,000 times per day.
“Nightswimming” feels like a particularly cinematic song. You can see it playing as the credits roll for the semi-autobiographical coming-of-age movie in your head. Or at least I can.