A song is a key for locked memory boxes. A song can transport you back through time, giving you a chance to relive moments and ideas that occurred back when you first heard that song. A song is not just a song; it is also a story.

As the pop culture media machine and basic arithmetic tells us, 1991 was 20 years ago and represented a musical year zero in many senses. The dawn of grunge, the death of hair metal, the birth of alternative nation, the year punk broke; not a bad time to be 16 years old and just discovering the world of music outside the boundaries defined by MuchMusic. And yet for me, the defining song of that era and my musical awakening didn’t open with a choppy, ascending guitar riff and the stomp that sold a million Boss DS-1 distortion pedals or feature a video with anarchist cheerleaders (though they were memorable in their own right). No, it was a simple melodic line played on a mandolin, of all the unfashionable instruments; it was R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”.

To be fair, it got to me well before Nirvana ever had a chance to. If memory serves, my older brother came back from a road trip to Florida that Spring with a handful of cassette singles (cassingles, as they were called), most of which were forgettable (Bingoboys, anyone?) but one of which – the one with a behatted Michael Stipe on its cover looking downcast – made a lasting impression. Not necessarily in a scales-falling-from-eyes sense, but the way in which it was musically immediate and memorable yet lyrically compelling and inscrutable was just about perfect for an insecure kid looking for something slightly pretentious to build an adolescent identity around. And for that year and many to come, that would be R.E.M. Not just the band and their music, but the strange and mysterious world from which they came – remember that the internet was still many years away and contemporaries and influences referenced in interviews and articles were nigh on impossible to learn more about from the suburbs of Toronto. Never mind the fact that the sounds of ’80s American college rock would be a taste I wouldn’t acquire for many years yet.

Choosing R.E.M. as my standard entering the cultural battleground that is high school wasn’t the easiest thing; there was some taunting from the Metallica faction (recall that the black album was also a 1991 artifact), grunge would prove to be far more the common musical tongue and easy conversation topic than folk-rock and the number of arty/sensitive girls who were impressed by my discerning tastes was approximately zero. But I didn’t choose Out Of Time to soundtrack my life for indie cred; that it would be the gateway drug that would introduce me to an entire world of independent and alternative music was something I’d only fully appreciate with the benefit of time and hindsight. But for 1991, I loved that it had mainstream appeal, that it topped the charts, would take home multiple Grammies and put the band on many magazine covers, of which I bought as many as I could. It was validating.

It’s not possible to overstate the importance of this song, this album, this band – their music didn’t save my life, but it did give me something to build it around. And so of course, I’ve taken them entirely for granted in recent years. That’s what you do with the pillars of your reality, after all. ‘d actually been having some difficulty choosing a song to write about for this piece but with R.E.M. suddenly calling it a day last month, after 31 years of making music and while everyone was talking as if “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was the only song that mattered in 1991, it became instantly obvious what my song should be. What it had to be. I eschewed doing any kind of R.E.M. farewell post on my blog; instead I’ll do this.

Michael, Mike, Peter and Bill – thank you.

- Frank Yang, music writer & founder of Chromewaves
Photos by Carrie Musgrave (1) & Lauren Schreiber-Sasaki (2, 3)