Comforting songs for trying times: "You are the everything," by R.E.M.
I have this seminal memory that shows up over and over again in my writing. I’m a kid, riding in the backseat of the family car. We’re driving home from my aunt and uncle’s house in Brooksville, Kentucky (hi, Aunt Milly!). It’s late at night. Summer. I’m sleepy. I’m leaning my head against the window.
The night outside is lit up by such a profusion of lightning bugs that even to my little child’s brain, it’s hard to believe they’re real. They fill the window next to me, so thick it’s like if I had a spoon long enough, I could reach out and stir them. I’m captivated by the way their lights blur as we drive by. Mostly I’m just captivated. Sleepy, but some part of me storing this memory away deep, deep in the fiber of my body, to pull out when I need it.
I’ve been spending more time than I’d like lately in full-on election panic mode. I have no idea what will happen come November. Or December. Or January. I don’t think anyone knows what will happen, but I send myself into a tailspin sometimes looking at polls or reading some new, horrendous headline. The specifics don’t matter. There is always a new horrendous headline to read.
Then the other morning I woke up with the R.E.M. song, “You are the everything,” in my head. Why? I’ve been listening to old R.E.M. albums, mostly Automatic for the People and Out of Time. Maybe Michael Stipe’s voice conjured the song up from my subconscious. Or was it those first lines—“Sometimes I feel like I can’t even sing/ I’m very scared for this world, I’m very scared for me.”
I am, in fact, very scared for this world. I am very scared for me. “Eviscerate your memory,” the next line reads. “Here’s a scene/ You’re in the backseat laying down, the windows wrap around/ To the sound of travel and the engine/ All you hear is time stand still in travel.”
What is so comforting about being a small child in a car headed home at night? Another favorite memory is of standing in front of the church we went to on Wednesday nights, after Wednesday supper and Girls in Action. A group of us would wait out there. My best friend, Brooke. Amy. Jeff. It was fall and dark and a little cold. People were heading home, but my mom worked at night so I had to wait for my dad to come pick me up. He always did, though. He always came.
The beauty of that memory is in knowing that soon, dad would pull up in his car, the one he drove to work which smelled different from mom’s car, and the two of us would drive the two miles home along the twisting roads, a flicker of light moving through the dark.
In the next verse, Michael Stipe sings, “I think about this world a lot and I cry.” He’s seen the films and the eyes, but right now, in this moment, he’s in a kitchen. He’s in a kitchen and everything is beautiful. It’s just a kitchen, but is it ever just a kitchen?
The kitchen in my childhood home had a bar where I would sit when I got home from school. I’d have a bowl of vegetarian vegetable soup (I wasn’t a vegetarian then, but already I didn’t much like meat) and I’d sit on the stool and watch Scooby-Doo or read a book quietly by myself and eat my soup. This was a ritual I needed to recover from what I now realize, was the quite stressful experience for an introvert of spending all day at school.
Now I have my own kitchen, complete with a couch, and it, too, is beautiful. It’s where people gather when we have friends over. It’s where my husband and I sit every morning with our bagels and tea and coffee and talk, usually with a cat sitting between us. Then we gather again before dinner. Or randomly in the middle of the day. If one of us sits down on the kitchen couch, it’s an invitation to have a chat. Even when the world is shit, we still have the kitchen and that’s a lot to have.
It's tempting to talk about the title of the song—you are the everything. It’s tempting to get all spiritual and metaphysical about it. “You are here with me,” Stipe sings. “You are here with me/ You have been here and you are everything.”
I don’t think he’s talking about god. Or he is, but not in the way most people would. There’s not old-white-guy-with-a-beard in the room with him. Not that god.
There is a woman. She’s beautiful. She’s young and old. She’s there with him and she always has been and she is everything. Or he’s, as in Michael Stipe himself is there. Or the narrator of the song. He is everything and he always has been.
The point isn’t really who it is, is it? The point is that he’s not alone and he never has been. Someone’s there with him. Someone always is. Someone always has been. And that’s enough. That is, in fact, everything.
In an echo of voices you can barely make out on the album (I never knew what they were singing) at the end of some phrases, the rest of the band sings, “say, say, the light.” Say the light. Speak it.
I heard in an interview once that Peter Buck didn’t like for there to be any parts in R.E.M.’s songs with no voice singing. He wanted Michael Stipe to be singing all the time. This is why Michael Stipe is always singing nonsense words or moaning or humming in so many songs.
Fill the song with voice. With singing. Say, say the light. Sometimes I feel like I can’t even sing and is there anything worse that that?
Sometimes I do feel like I can’t even sing. Or draw. Or write. Or take a shower. Or feed myself. Or teach my students. Or get out bed. Sometimes I feel like I can’t do anything but lie on my couch with my phone in a white-knuckled death-grip, consuming the chaos and filing myself with dread and despair.
But, hey, remember the lightning bugs in that night ride home? Remember that the lightning bugs still come up in the spring? Remember the taste of vegetarian vegetable soup and the comfort of relative quiet in a kitchen at the end of the day? Remember riding home in a car with your dad or your mom or your sister or your friend or your person late at night? Remember standing in a kitchen full of people you love and laughter? And music? Remember all of that?
Yeah. That’s it. That’s everything.
I’ve been listening to a lot of 80s music lately, because it’s my comfort zone and I need a lot of comfort right now. Also, like Michael Stipe in this song, people were pretty angsty and pissed off back then, which feels familiar. So I thought I might start a series—comforting songs for trying times. I have a couple in mind, but would love to hear—what are your go-to songs for hard times?
Oh, this really brought back a memory for me. My mom is driving us home at night and I realise that the lightening bugs disappear in the headlights but reappear in the dark behind us among the birch trees. I am looking out the back window, fascinated by them. Such magic and such peace. Good to hold onto in these times.
Thoughtful as always. Yes we need to remember life’s pleasures when faced with an uncertain future. It’s the only way.